


Damaged Goods

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Changing Tenses, Colonist (Mass Effect), Dark Comedy, Explosions, F/M, Gun Violence, Hijacking, POV Alternating, Paragade (Mass Effect), Post-Mass Effect 3, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ruthless (Mass Effect), Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 08:53:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4660380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Shepard and Garrus attempt to take a vacation, thwart a hijacking, commandeer a security scooter, destroy most of a luxury liner, pick up a baby krogan, and have to explain themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Damaged Goods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SkySamuelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkySamuelle/gifts).



> Accompanying art and fanmixes: [Damaged Goods: A Gallery](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4477445/), by SkySamuelle.
> 
> This works more or less from the Extended Cut's version of the Destroy ending, if you assume bits of it (mostly the Starchild bits) took place entirely inside Shepard's head. Other things that I am ignoring include the ME3 easter egg of Tali's face, because half-assed Photoshopping is less fun than alien anatomy.
> 
> Spoilers for the Omega DLC.

" _Keelah_ , Shepard."

The screen of the omni-tool washes out the sepia tones of Tali's skin, and the connection is staticky enough to blur the white glow of her eyes. It's still strange to see her face; her features are sharp and intricate, as if carved from sandstone, particularly where the ridged layers of her cheeks sweep back into the shadow of her hood. At a higher resolution, the slits that allow symbiotic communion with her homeworld would be visible.

The architecture of Tali's brow finds an angle between amusement and frustration. "You were supposed to be on vacation."

"We were," Shepard replies, tilting her omni-tool so that it picks up less of the wreckage behind her. "We made it all the way to the beach before the shooting started."

"You really can't take us anywhere," Garrus adds. His mandible tickles the side of her neck.

Tali shakes her head. "But why did you even bring your weapons? It's good that you did, of course, but I'm surprised they let you on board."

"Shepard's still playing her Spectre card."

"Damn right I am. I just wish we'd packed armor."

"You two are _terrible_ at vacations," Tali says, with a fondly exasperated sigh. 

She looks like she's about to add something when Shepard hears restless noises in the next room, whispers, "Hang on, it's waking up again," and mutes her omni-tool. After a brief staring contest with Garrus, she settles back into her chair as he gets up to investigate. 

In the silence, Tali's face darkens, and she looks away as she mimes tugging something around her chest. A quick glance confirms that Shepard shifted around just enough to cause a neckline malfunction. She adjusts the fabric and offers an apologetic shrug when Tali makes eye contact again.

Garrus returns and says, "We're good for now, as long as Tali doesn't cackle."

Shepard unmutes the connection. "Coast's clear. What's the ETA on that ship?"

"Still a few hours out," Tali replies. "While we wait, why don't you start from the beginning and tell me how you ended up with the krogan?"

* * *

On the list of places Shepard didn't expect to be so soon after the Reapers nearly wiped out galactic civilization, a new luxury liner was near the top. Not that she was surprised the thing existed—the volus corporation behind it had assumed correctly that a worthwhile number of people would pay a worthwhile number of credits to spend a week cruising along the edge of the Perseus Veil, far from most reminders of the devastation—but she was surprised to be aboard it.

She was still a little surprised to be anywhere at all, really.

The tickets had come as a collective gift from those who had served with her on the _Normandy_ and who knew her well enough to attach messages preemptively addressing her objections: "Think of it as a reward for your progress in PT," "Don't worry, Lola, Doc paid for most of it," "All you'll miss is more diplomatic bullshit," "If you get bored, just raise a little hell," on and on until she could close her eyes and follow their voices back home, until she could fill every gap with ghosts. And at the end, Liara's: "I know you're restless, but please try to rest. You've carried the weight of the world for years now, Shepard. Lay it down for a while."

Not a lot of room left for argument, especially after Hackett authorized her leave of advisory duties by noting that he'd find a way to contact her if any vital infrastructure projects went rogue.

So here she was on a lounge chair on a holographic beach, surrounded by various species of the post-war rich, trying very hard not to evaluate the area in terms of strategic cover or resent being asked to leave all of the guns back in the cabin. The trouble with swimsuits was the lack of space to discreetly stash a pistol.

"Try this one," Garrus said, passing her a bright green drink. "It's got a festive umbrella in it."

Shepard sniffed it and was pleased to detect only a faint whiff of fruit over the harsh scent of liquor; he knew her feelings on cloying mixed drinks. She clinked it against his electric blue concoction and took a sip that burned its way down her throat.

Garrus settled back into the lounge chair beside her, the simulated orange sun reflecting from his few exposed plates. There wasn't much in the way of swimwear for turians, who regarded beaches with the cautious disinterest of the non-buoyant, so he'd opted for eye-searingly colorful civvies.

The current fashion in cut-outs meant that Shepard's swimsuit framed several of her most impressive scars, including the faintly glowing spiderweb on her abdomen and the thick seams in her shoulder. So far she'd noticed a few other beach-goers pointing her out and whispering, but they had yet to approach her. This suited her fine; if visible scars were all it took to ward off C-list celebrities who thought "Are you really _that_ Shepard?" was a good opener, she'd spend the rest of the cruise half-naked.

And if they didn't want to be reminded of what had left her this way, then she envied them the luxury. It wasn't the expense that kept her from seeking out cosmetic surgery.

"By request, Lusia," announced the holobeach's VI as the projected sky and sea shaded into a pale green. A group of asari lounging on the silvering sand applauded.

Shepard tried and failed not to think about Thessia.

"Hey." Garrus's filed talon stroked the underside of her chin until she faced him. "You're not relaxing."

She directed a pointed look at his flickering visor. "Neither are you. Reading reports from Palaven?"

The visor lights winked out. "I probably shouldn't. I don't enjoy feeling useless."

Shepard eyed the other passengers, lounging on holographic sand and wading in a pool meant to mimic a sparkling-clear sea. "This is wasted on us, huh?"

"Well, the drinks aren't bad." Garrus's finger slipped down to trail along her collarbone. "And neither is the view."

He had almost certainly borrowed this line from the human romance vids he watched for "research" when he thought she was asleep, which, if anything, made it more charming. When she opened her mouth to banter, a trio of human children ran past, blasting each other with water pistols and laughing as if Earth hadn't been ravaged. She found them suddenly and utterly alien.

Garrus reclaimed her attention by plucking at the halter tie of her suit. "If the holobeach isn't helping us relax," he said, flexing his brow plates, "maybe we should head back to the cabin and work off some tension?"

Things unlikely to be back in the cabin included C-list celebrities, PTSD triggers, and any reason to let him keep wearing those pants. "Best idea I've heard all day," she replied, shifting to close the gap between them.

"Glad to hear it. I wasn't sure I'd beat out the non-contact kowla tournament this afternoon."

"You know me, I prefer full contact." His mandibles relaxed as she stroked his bare neck. She'd never quite found the word for the texture there, something between slink leather and moleskin. 

Figuring out how to kiss had taken work, and not only because they'd kept focusing on each other's expressions and breaking into nervous laughter. They hadn't managed it that first night, before the Omega-4 relay; working things out below the neck had been challenge enough. But afterward, when they'd come back impossibly alive, she'd called him up to her cabin, settled in with him on the sofa, and told him to close his eyes and mind his teeth.

They'd made it work. It was all tongues and angles, but it worked. It had been a long time since she'd nicked a soft part of her mouth on a sharp part of his.

That streak ended when a burst of gunfire made her jump.

* * *

Tali coughs. "You could have started with that part, Shepard."

"Hey, you asked for the beginning. And I wanted you to know that I did _try_ to enjoy that vacation you helped pay for."

"Which I appreciate, but I was a little worried that I'd be hearing a detailed description of your sex life."

"We're not done with the story yet," Garrus points out. "Still plenty of time for that."

"That's an empty threat coming from you, Vakarian. You're probably already blushing under your plates."

"You can't prove anything." He leans forward, mandibles flexed. "But I can make _you_ blush just by asking what's in your Nerve-Stim program."

Washed out as it is over the poor connection, Tali's face still manages to shade darker. "Let's just get back to your story."

"No, let me guess. You don't even have to answer; I'll just watch what colors you turn."

Tali crosses her arms. " _This_ color means that I'm the one sending a ship out to rescue you, and I could very easily call it back."

Shepard gives up trying to keep a straight face.

* * *

The sand and sky flickered and distorted, then vanished altogether as another round blasted the smoking projector. Passengers scattered screaming over the padded deck.

As he rolled for cover behind his lounge chair, Garrus tasted the alien bitterness of Shepard's blood on his teeth, cursed himself, and glanced at her where she'd dived behind her own chair. His visor reported that her vitals were normal, at least for the circumstances, and she was already glowing blue with a barrier. No armor, and her muscle tone still wasn't back to normal; he tried not to worry about her implants.

His rifle lay uselessly back in their cabin. He'd cause a diplomatic incident before he left it behind again.

Three figures in the unmistakable white armor of Cerberus charged in from the elevator access hall, where security should have been. The leader fired his assault rifle at the ceiling and barked, "We have control of the ship! On the floor, now!"

Shepard caught Garrus's eyes and tipped her head toward the soldier on the right, who was sweeping an M-13 Raptor over the room, then turned her palm up and curled her fingers inward. He flexed his own hands to show willing.

As the leader went on shouting, she popped up just long enough to wrap a field around the Raptor and yank it toward her.

The soldier flew with it, briefly, until he lost his grip and went skidding along the floor. Garrus leapt to intercept the rifle, catching it hard against his chest—harder than he'd expected, almost hard enough to crack a plate—and used the moment of confusion to line up a shot. The trigger wiggled and the scope was slightly bent, but it was nothing he couldn't compensate for. The leader's helmet burst into red chunks.

Rounds sprayed over his shoulder. The last soldier standing had a level head but lousy aim. "Got him," Shepard said, in the instant before she charged through the next round of fire in a blaze of biotic fury. The explosion that followed indicated she wasn't keeping that one alive for questioning.

Garrus trained his new rifle on the remaining soldier and got as far as "Don't—" before the man began patting himself down, as if fumbling for a backup weapon. Grazing his arm seemed like a fair warning. "Next one goes in your head," Garrus added, just before the soldier's face exploded through the front of his helmet.

"Dammit!" Shepard returned with the shotgun that had recently failed to shoot Garrus. "Ocular flashbang?"

He nudged the remains with his foot. "Looks more like a grenade got caught under his visor."

"Pretty sloppy for Cerberus." Frowning, she turned the shotgun over in her hands. "Equipment checks out, but—"

"Speak up, Shepard. I can barely hear you over the panic."

The civilians did not seem comforted by the ease and style with which the attackers had been dispatched; if anything, they were more frantic, or at least more loudly frantic. "Check the hall," Shepard said. As Garrus headed that way, she projected her voice over the din: "I'm Commander Shepard, and I'm getting us all out of here alive!"

This was a problem she could solve by shouting, and she tended to do well with those. As she verbally herded the crowd, Garrus peered around the door frame into the access hall. It was clear, straight through to the elevator. No signs of Cerberus, security, or a struggle. 

An inside job, maybe. He hadn't noticed any signs of mercenary affiliation on the asari that handled boarding; while the major bands slaughtered contract-breakers, freelancers might have been willing to compromise their reputation for the right price. Though the galaxy had become a strange place indeed if the remnants of Cerberus were colluding with asari.

The console didn't put up a fight as he sealed the elevator and hall doors. While he had no trouble inputting commands to the alarms and intercoms, nothing resulted from them, which almost certainly meant that the security VI was offline. He couldn't do as much as he liked without his omni-tool, but what defenses he hacked together would at least afford some time to get into position if reinforcements arrived.

"It doesn't matter what you're worth as a hostage," Shepard was saying as he returned. "That goes for all of you. Raise your hand if you're injured."

As the passengers failed to follow instructions, Garrus returned to the corpses to check for comms, ammo, identification, anything that might be useful. He came up with a handful of thermal clips. When he reached the only body with an intact head, he removed the cracked helmet and spent a long, bemused moment staring at a dead batarian.

" _Physically_ injured," Shepard amended. "Don't raise that hand again unless it's bleeding." At least she had the passengers settled now, or near enough. A paranoid salarian was the only one still babbling, and he was down to mumbles. Even most of the children seemed more interested in staring at her than continuing to wail.

Garrus positioned himself near her with a clear line of sight on the door. She caught his eye and nodded. 

"Report, Commander," he said, loudly enough to carry through the room. "Area's secured." Keep things brisk and official, and people would behave. More or less. It would have been easier if the people in question were turians, who knew how to form an orderly mob.

The only elcor present spoke up: "Putting on a brave front: I will require additional security. As you are all aware, I am the most valuable passenger on this ship."

Garrus could almost hear Shepard's teeth grinding over the crowd's rumbling dissent. "It doesn't matter," she said. "We've been over this."

"Moderately affronted: You don't recognize me. Allow me to refresh your memory." The elcor cleared his throat, which sounded a bit like the Mako's engine trying to start after Shepard took it out for a spin. "Nostalgic melancholy: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio." He waited a moment before adding, "Reproachfully: You are on record stating that I am your favorite actor on the Citadel."

" _Is_ she," said Garrus.

Under her breath Shepard muttered, "I did a lot of endorsements back in '85."

"She gets hit in the head a lot," Garrus told the elcor. "Occupational hazard."

The elcor stared inscrutably at them. In the back, an asari piped up with, "I, for one, expect a full refund."

"Right now," Shepard said, steering the discussion firmly back into her element, "our priority is keeping everyone safe and stopping the hijackers. We can't do that unless we stay focused. Is anyone here crew?"

After an uncomfortable silence, a volus raised his hand. "I own eleven ships."

Shepard tried again, voice tighter: "Is anyone here part of _this ship's_ crew?"

A salarian tittered. When Shepard called him out for it, he sniffed and said, "Didn't you look at any of the promotional materials? The _Spirit of Talis Fia_ has only three engineers and a network of VIs. 'The efficient ship of the new era.' That was in the ad."

The new era being the era after a drastic reduction in the galaxy's population. Garrus fit the pieces together: the volus knack for cost-cutting, the demand for skilled workers driving salaries prohibitively high, the scientific advances of wartime leaking into the private sector, the temptation to skimp on security in a quiet corner of the galaxy...

A group of terrorists in control of even one essential VI could wreak a tremendous amount of havoc in a short time.

When shouting failed, Shepard generally progressed to punching. Her right hand had begun to twitch. "Who the hell thought that was a good idea?"

No one present professed to. Shaking her head, Shepard continued, "All right. Does anyone here have combat experience?"

The same volus raised his hand. "I own—"

"Is anyone here _personally trained_ in firearms, hand-to-hand, or biotic combat?"

No hands went up. Garrus looked pointedly at a cluster of asari and said, "Seriously?"

One raised her chin at him. "Why would you expect us to be? We're not _turians_."

He bit back a remark about Thessia's military readiness; it was as likely to upset Shepard as the asari.

"In that case," Shepard said, "I want you all to stay here and stay calm. We're going to secure the ship."

One of the humans made a noise equal parts panicked and affronted. "Are you insane? What if more of them come?"

"They'd have to get through me first," Shepard replied, with the steely conviction of someone who wasn't wearing only a scrap of purple spandex. Her biotic barrier flared.

Some combination of her speech, stance, and shotgun appeased the crowd. The human stood down.

Satisfied, Shepard headed for the hall. Garrus followed, securing the door behind them. Once there was no chance of eavesdropping passengers, she asked, "So what do you figure is going on here?"

"Nothing good. The security VI's offline, this looks like an inside job, and at least one of those 'Cerberus' troops was batarian."

"Sometimes I think the universe is fucking with me." She trained her shotgun ahead as they crossed the empty hall to the elevator. "So first—" 

Her gait broke. Garrus halted and offered his arm, which she clung to for four harsh breaths, left leg trembling. As she let go and shifted her weight, she said, "Well, the timing could have been worse."

She'd made it nearly a week without an incident, too. He suspected that these implant issues were stress-related, like the glowing hairline fractures that still sometimes widened on her face, but he'd long since learned that pointing this out did not help.

"Are you all right?" he asked. 

She rubbed her hip. "I'll manage."

"Where's your head?"

She had bad days. The war followed her like a black sea lapping at her heels, and its tides rolled in and out erratically. Sometimes when the water rose, he could help her keep her head above the waves. Other times she sank as heavily as if she were back inside the Triton, and there was no reaching her until the waters receded. At her worst she spiraled inward, breathing saltwater, loathing herself for every flicker of disappointment at her own survival.

He understood; he had needed to spend a long time alone with cold, clear equations, focusing so tightly on fractions of percentages that nothing else could creep in. Weapons, unlike brains, had a clear path back to optimal condition. There was no logic to the way ten deaths still weighed heavier on him than millions, or how watching his mother fade cut deeper than watching Palaven burn.

"Right here," Shepard replied, meeting his eyes. She almost managed a smile. "Don't worry. Nothing keeps me together like a good fight."

* * *

Tali leans forward, eyes bright with concern. "You know that I worry about you both, don't you?"

Shepard is still a little broken, and always will be; her cybernetic parts kept her tenuously alive despite Harbinger's beam, the Maurader's shot, and the partial collapse of the Citadel on top of her, but there's no one left who understands exactly how all those parts work. When her wire-woven muscles short out, she remembers how Miranda's arm grasped at her, weakly, before going limp. Can't ever save everyone.

"I don't know why," Garrus replies. "We're damn near impossible to kill." He's less broken and much less synthetic: just half his face and a knee, now. But they're the same kind of tired, down in the meat and alloys of their bones.

"That's not usually what I'm worried about. At least when you're not being hijacked." Tali's long fingers hook patterns around each other. "I'm not a soldier, not the way you two are. Adjusting to life on Rannoch is... complicated. Joyful and beautiful, but complicated even for the quarians who aren't mourning a geth. But we expect that. The smile curves to catch the tears." The shift in her tone suggests a quotation. Shifting back, she folds her arms, and her eyes glow a little more intensely. "Neither of you is good at complicated when it comes to feelings. How are you adjusting, honestly?"

Garrus still doesn't like to talk about Omega. The best Shepard has ever coaxed out of him is that he meant to make a difference or die trying, and his squad's massacre blurred those goals together. She understands; she watched the remains of the geth burn in Rannoch's atmosphere, felt Thessia crumble beneath her feet, crawled broken and bleeding to the Catalyst's controls. She carries it all in the pit of her stomach, a darkness deeper than grief or rage, a bleak freedom from all desire but to drown.

She carries it, but she does not let it consume her. "We're getting better." That's vague enough to be unconvincing, so she adds, "Garrus paints now."

For a silent moment, Tali and Garrus both stare at her. Then Tali's narrow lips tremble until her laughter spills between them, and Garrus slumps into the very picture of turian aggrievement, mandibles sucked in tight and facial plates shifting in toward his nose.

"Vakarian," Tali drawls once she has control of her giggles, "I had no idea you were an artist."

"You say something _once_ ," he grumbles, "and then one day you wake up to a box of art supplies and a datapad full of Bab'Raas vids."

Tali nods approvingly. "His story was the best part of _Exiles: Portraits of the Lost Quarians_. Those little shrubs really do look happy."

"Garrus is getting pretty good at landscapes," Shepard says, with a conciliatory shoulder pat. He makes unassuaged clicking noises in the back of his mouth. "I'd show you pictures, but he'd probably make me sleep on the couch for a week."

"That's okay." Tali beams. "I'm using the power of my imagination."

Garrus straightens up into a counter-attack. "Shepard cooks."

"Do not." Under Tali's oppressively rapt gaze, Shepard adds, "Not a lot. I just miss decent food, okay? The asari get it wrong, and it's not that damn hard to make paneer."

"Paneer is solidified livestock secretions." Mandibles ajar, Garrus looks like he's exposing a scandal. "Sometimes it squeaks."

She glares at him. "You want to talk about funny noises? Let's talk about the dextro side of the kitchen."

Tali's grin ripples through the layers of her cheeks. "You're both domesticated."

Their neighbors would probably disagree, at least the ones who aren't undercover Shadow Broker agents. Pointing out that they're a little too rowdy for a nice part of town feels pathetic, though, so Shepard glowers and says, "Let's get back to the ass-kicking."

* * *

Shepard's hip was still throbbing faintly when the elevator halted. She and Garrus broke to opposite sides of the door for cover as it opened, but there was no sign of hostile forces. An unknown enemy with unknown numbers and unknown motivation—business as used to be usual. At least this time she wasn't charging into a heretic geth ambush or the Omega-4 relay.

Garrus tapped his visor before making a dismissive noise. "One thing the volus don't cut corners on is privacy. The hall's clear, but the cabin walls have enough reinforcement to interfere with scanning."

"So we'll start with our cabin. We can save any other surprises for when we have better guns." The Eviscerator was a solid shotgun model, but she was scandalized by this one's condition: scuffed and scratched barrel, sticky trigger, cracked heat sink. Only the ignorant or desperate would have deemed it fit for battle.

"Security knows we brought weapons," Garrus pointed out, following her down the hall. "If they're in on this and not complete idiots, they've probably raided our cabin."

" _Tried_ to raid it. If they broke into those lockers, we get a refund."

"I'll keep that in mind when I'm being shot by my own rifle."

The locks on the cabin doors all shone green, evidence of a complete security shutdown. Shepard nodded at Garrus as they approached their cabin. They split for cover on either side of the door before tapping it open.

A pair of asari in Cerberus armor whirled from the ransacked mess they'd made. One went down in a purple mist when Garrus's shot caught her between the eyes; the other didn't manage a useful reaction in the time it took Shepard to charge and fire.

The third, who'd been in the closet, biotically slammed Garrus into the wall.

Shepard used her own biotics to yank the asari bodily into the open. The white armor sparked blue but didn't generate a kinetic barrier. Two rounds from the Eviscerator tore through the ceramic plating and the body behind it.

After a quick scan for any more lurking hostiles, Shepard offered Garrus her hand. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Your rifle stunt hit me harder than the wall did." He accepted and pulled himself up with a grunt. "Pretty sure that was dumb luck, not an ambush."

She nodded. "No way they're part of Cerberus. They're sloppy as hell, and their armor's not even functional."

"It's salvage." Garrus crouched by the asari she had just killed and held up one of the limp arms. "Look. Half the plates are cracked, this one's missing a gauntlet, and no one here has a helmet."

"No one got into our guns, either." The lockers had been moved to the foot of the bed and showed signs of attempted forced entry, but the holographic lock displays remained red. Either the asari had been technically inept, or the manufacturer hadn't been exaggerating the level of security. Shepard patted one of the lockers fondly on her way to the dresser.

The locks chimed open as she dug through her vacation clothes. "I know you didn't pack a hardsuit," Garrus said.

"I just don't want to save the day in _this_." She unknotted the halter straps and peeled off her swimsuit, kicking it from her ankle for good measure. "With my luck, that damn Shepard VI would get a swimsuit edition."

"What would it say? 'You like this, you should see what I wore to meet Leviathan'?"

"Yuk it up, Garrus." Something small and bright flashed in her peripheral vision, and she twisted to catch the omni-tool he'd tossed. Once she'd fixed it to her wrist, she set about getting dressed. This day would have to be saved in a tracksuit.

By the time she'd zipped up, Garrus had begun loading one of his own rifles from the stash of thermal clips he'd strewn over the bed. Shepard squeezed a packet of energy gel into her mouth and joined him.

Without a hardsuit, she had to be creative. After hooking her featherweight Shuriken into her waistband, she dug past another SMG and two pistols to reach her favorite firearm, her sweet reliable overkill, the gun she might have named if she hadn't spent so much time listening to Zaeed wax unsettlingly anthropomorphic about Jessie.

"You brought the Graal." Garrus's intonation suggested that this began as a question but deflated for lack of surprise.

She grinned and began loading it with its specialized flechettes. "Like I'd spend two weeks away from my favorite shotgun. Didn't you bring the Black Widow?"

"No, just a Viper. It's a little more travel-sized." He held up the rifle briefly before collapsing it. "By the way, are you ever going to tell me how much that marvel of munitions engineering cost?"

"It was a gift, Garrus," she replied, grabbing one of the pillows and divesting it of its case. "Telling you would be tacky."

"Not from a turian perspective. We have a whole system for how much you should spend depending on rank, occasion, and how much the other person has spent on you."

"Color me completely unsurprised." She stuffed a fistful of flechettes and thermal clips into the pillow case. "If you really feel like you owe me something, you can take over feeding the fish." As she added her midnight snack supply of energy gel, something jiggled loose in her memory: "Shit, did I remember to set the auto-feeder?"

He nodded and began filling a second pillow case. No such thing as too much ammo. "Yeah. I checked on the way out."

"Thanks. How many highly trained military operatives does it take to keep an aquarium going?" As soon as she said the words, she wished she hadn't; they hitched on something in the back of her mind. "Do you miss it?"

The clatter of thermal clips halted. "The aquarium?"

"The life. You could still take that Blackwatch offer. Be a big-shot general again. Or something." So much for sounding casual. She shouldn't have thought about Zaeed, because she still couldn't think about Zaeed without thinking about how he bled out in a Presidium apartment. 

Garrus's tone was dry: "Getting a tank dropped on me seemed like a pretty good end to my active duty." When he first told her about the reconstructive work on his leg, he'd joked that between that and his face, he was slowly catching up to her. "You're not still stuck on that Shadow Broker file, are you? Anyone who thought you kept me from living up to my potential wasn't paying attention."

She exhaled slowly. "Maybe a little. I just need you to know you don't have to be done."

His hand squeezed her shoulder, coaxing her into eye contact. "Is it that hard to believe I'm actually enjoying the lack of constant near-death experiences? A few years ago, I would have jumped at Blackwatch. Now just thinking about it makes me feel old."

"If you're old, what does that make me?"

"I have no idea. You died and screwed up the math."

A quiet laugh shook its way out of her. She hooked her fingers briefly with his, then said, "Let's move."

The rest of the cabins in the block were empty. Several were in disarray, sheets ripped from the beds and furniture upended. Two had rounds of ammunition embedded in the ceiling. There were no corpses and little sign of looting.

"Hostage grabs," Garrus said. "I hope they're just hostages, anyway."

Just hostages, not organ farms or husks or lab rats or shambling thralls of sea monsters. Perspective was a funny thing. "If they're taking hostages, they want something," Shepard pointed out. "They also know I'm on board."

"Then they must be hoping for Terra Nova instead of Torfan."

"So am I."

Once they'd swept the rest of the deck and come up empty, they returned to the elevator. "If this was a normal ship," Shepard said, "I'd say our hijackers are holed up on the bridge. Figure this ship's still got one without a real crew?"

Garrus nodded. "It's the 'efficient' ship of the new era, not the 'new' ship. Not that I'm an expert on luxury liners, but this thing's been retrofitted, not redesigned from scratch. Bet you the volus just ripped out the extra chairs."

"Good. I saw a service elevator on the promenade deck, past the place where I bought that swimsuit."

"You know, I wouldn't mind fighting through a fashion boutique."

"Don't say I never take you anywhere nice." Shepard hit the call button and squeezed into the narrow cover afforded by the corner. "Let's check the other passenger deck first."

No ambush awaited them in the elevator. When the doors opened on the next deck, a grenade flew between them. Shepard hurled it back and heard a satisfying series of screams before the explosion.

Garrus fired into the dissipating smoke and ducked back into cover just ahead of a spray of projectiles. "Definitely an ambush this time," he reported. "At least three Guardians out there. Maybe a dozen hostiles total."

"Civilians?"

"None that my visor picked up."

Graal readied, Shepard said, "Cover me," and charged, biotics blazing, into the hall. Smoke and surprise bought her time to detonate her barrier, which took down the clustered hijackers like a ring of sucker punches. Most of them scrambled around the corner and out of her line of sight before the Graal had rattled to full power in her hand. One who didn't rushed her and got a biotically powered punch to the gut for his trouble.

A shot zoomed over her shoulder to put down a human without a helmet. Shepard leveled the Graal at a Guardian fumbling with the pin in a grenade.

Before she could fire, a spasm wracked her back as her synthetic vertebrae locked together. Only for an instant, but an instant was enough to drop her.

A single shot from the elevator sent the Guardian tumbling after her. Trapped behind the shield, the grenade splattered the opposite wall with the crimson remains of its would-be thrower. From the floor, Shepard managed a gesture to hurl the shield into the midst of the hijackers who could still line up a shot, knocking them around the corner.

"You okay?" Garrus called, abandoning his cover.

"I'm okay." The survivors were cagier, close but out of easy shooting or grabbing range. Their skittishness gave her time to get to her feet, teeth gritted against the muted shocks along her spine. "Did you seal off the elevator?"

"Of course."

"Then let's mop 'em up."

Inhaling slowly, Shepard squeezed the trigger until the Graal whirred and vibrated in her hand. On the exhale she leaned around the corner and sent a flechette burrowing through the second Guardian's shield, armor, and torso, and on into the wall. The other hijackers returned a panicked wave of gunfire her way too late to catch her exposed.

Her barrier was recharging slowly, no doubt because of her seizure. As she waited, she charged the Graal again. The indistinct noise of an argument carried around the corner.

"Surrender's still an option," Shepard yelled over the murmuring. "Put your weapons on the floor and kick 'em over, and you can get out of this alive!"

There was a long pause before the third Guardian barreled around the corner, shield-first. Garrus took it out with a neat shot through the slot.

Shepard's barrier finally flared to full strength. "Last call."

In response, a grenade landed at her feet. She swept it up in a shimmer of biotics and flung it back, sending a shockwave after it for good measure. The remaining hijackers were briefly, spectacularly loud. Graal raised, she peered around the corner into the dissipating smoke.

A burst and a thump alerted her to Garrus's taking down a straggler who had been out of range. "All clear?" she asked, and on confirmation, began sweeping the fallen with her gun, alert for signs of movement. She tried not think about what it meant that the hijackers' determination to fight to their deaths more thrilled than dismayed her. Even after Torfan, some small, dark part of her found surrender disappointing.

"Life signs on your left," said Garrus. 

Nudging one body with her foot elicited a groan. Shepard lined up the Graal with the visor and said, "Move and I put you down. What the hell is going on here?"

"You can't stop us." The voice sounded asari; Shepard glimpsed violet through a crack in the ill-fitting helmet. "We have the ship."

"I've stopped a hell of a lot worse than this. What's your connection to Cerberus?"

"What do you think?" The asari's laugh ended in a pained wheeze. "We take what we can get. How does it feel to know Omega's scavengers have you at their mercy?"

"Interesting mercy you've got us at," Garrus said. "Who are you with, the Novas? Havoc?"

The asari snarled. "I _told_ you. We're Scavengers. We're the ones who'll show the galaxy that you can die."

A blue flare gave Shepard enough warning to pull the trigger before the biotic field had finished forming. At close range, the Graal didn't leave much intact.

"Scavengers, huh." Garrus stared at her, visor blinking, before turning to scan the rest of the hallway. "Never heard of 'em. There's been plenty of opportunity for shakeup on Omega, though."

Much of which Shepard had probably facilitated when she put Aria back on her throne. Collateral damage always followed in her wake, not all of it as immediate and obvious as the shockwaves that had obliterated every AI in the galaxy. Long after the shouting and the apologies and the slow creep of resignation, there was still a thin, cold wall between her and Joker.

And dwelling on it accomplished nothing, she reminded herself firmly. "So that takes Cerberus out of the equation. Any guesses what terrorists from Omega want?"

Garrus shrugged. "Could be angling for ransoms. Could be trying to crash this thing into the nearest planet. That's always a popular plan."

"Better get on it, then. Tali would kill us if we let anything happen to Rannoch."

* * *

"I really would," Tali interjects. "And then I'd kill you again for getting yourselves crashed into it."

"And then would you kill us again for getting killed by you?" Garrus asks. "Because it sounds like you haven't thought this plan through to the exit strategy."

"Oh, there's an exit strategy, Vakarian. Don't kill yourself destroying my homeworld and you'll never have to find out what it is."

"Well, now I'm curious."

Shepard chimes in with, "Me too. I keep getting killed on my own, but it never takes."

There's an uncertainty in the silence that follows, and she can't blame them for it. What's funny about her death one day is the beginning of a spiral the next, a dark invitation to consider how easy it would have been to die again at Anderson's side, secure in the promise of victory, and fade into a final dream of saving Garrus a seat at the bar. It would have been nice, for once, to have a pleasant dream. It would have been nice to be done.

Instead she woke to a galaxy already bickering over how soon it would be appropriate to build a new colony over a mass grave, and she carried the dread inside her for months that Garrus would ask suspiciously whether she was happy she survived. "Happy" hadn't even made sense to her in that context, no more than it would have made sense to ask whether she was liquid or numerical about her survival.

So now she laughs, to show that it's become something like all right. "I've gotta warn you, everyone who's ever tried to kill me has ended up looking really annoyed."

"Briefly, anyway." Garrus matches her tone. "Then they mostly look dead."

"So I've noticed," Tali says lightly. "Shall we return to how you managed not to initiate a terrible series of your own deaths?"

* * *

They found a room near the end of the hall guarded by a lone human, who refused to surrender even after her rifle jammed. Her broken armor cracked apart like an eggshell as her body hit the floor.

"They're not planning to get out of here alive," Shepard said as Garrus took up a defensive position near the door.

Suicidal hijackers never boded well. "That's my impression, too. I'll breathe a lot easier once we're the ones steering this boat." At his nod, she tapped the door open, barrier glowing.

Inside were only passengers, crammed together in flagrant violation of the fire code. "You're safe," Shepard told them, and the air shimmered with biotics as she held back a stampede. "The holobeach is secure, and we're going to escort you down. No shoving!"

She got them to file out of the room in a more or less orderly fashion, only to watch them scatter to their cabins. "If we ever take another vacation," Garrus said, "let's do it with turians. Everyone would at least know how to follow instructions."

"If we ever take another vacation, let's do it _alone_." Shepard took a deep breath before shouting, "Leave your valuables! We're going to seal off the deck!"

They wasted time they couldn't spare herding people who were baffled that rules were meant to apply equally to them. By the time they'd moved the last elevator load to the beach, Garrus could hear Shepard's teeth grinding. 

As he closed off the deck, she said, "There'd better be a decent fight on the promenade."

"I don't think that'll be an issue."

No fight awaited immediately after the doors opened on the promenade's walkway, on the end where smaller, more utilitarian shops catered to the needs of passengers who had forgotten toiletries. From a distance, the kiosks appeared to be offline, no doubt tied to the same systems that ran the rest of the ship. A network of dark cameras failed to patrol for shoplifters. 

Ahead, the wide walkway dipped down out of sight to allow for the vaulted ceiling over the central intersection. A makeshift barricade of shipping crates peeked above the curve.

Shepard led the way toward it, hugging the wall. "Bad news is they know where we're approaching from. Good news is we're obviously a threat to them."

"That's also more bad news." Garrus's height afforded him a better view, as well as a reason to duck almost before he'd processed the information from his visor. "And now there's worse news."

She dropped low. "Bad enough to make up for us having the high ground?"

"Check your omni-tool."

Frowning, she tapped her wrist and watched the slowed second of footage he'd sent. She replayed it twice before asking, "How the _fuck_ did they get an Atlas in here?"

"For starters, I'd say security was definitely in on it."

"When I write a review of this trip, remind me to say that this is the weirdest hijacking I've ever been caught up in." Shepard crept closer to the barricade and aligned her right eye with a narrow gap between crates. Her nose wrinkled as she squinted. "Good news is it's only an Atlas down there."

"Right, only a top-of-the-line assault mech. Nothing we'd want armor or heavy weapons for."

She turned to him with a scowl. "I've taken them down solo."

"I know. Before." 

She'd perfected a system of detonating and restoring her barrier amid a frenzy of shotguns blasts, with a margin of error measured in milliseconds. No room for locked joints or muscle spasms. The stiffness in her shoulders made it clear that he didn't need to point this out.

He knelt at the gap and angled his visor through it, scanning for snipers, conveniently obscured walkways, or chunks of the roof that might be collapsed with a few expert shots. He found none of any.

"Hey," said Shepard, "there's a security office back here. Might have something we can get creative with."

The door's lock was as offline as every other on the ship. Inside, the small office didn't offer much: a few datapads with no local networks to connect to, shelves of cleaning supplies, a flimsy-looking scooter with "SECURITY" painted on the frame, and a posted reminder that all shop VIs were required to be integrated into the master system. As Garrus looked for manual overrides, Shepard strode purposefully toward the scooter.

"That thing's a piece of shit," he pointed out as she freed it from its locked stand.

"Got any better ideas?"

Turning out the lights in the promenade would have been good for at least a few seconds' surprise, but the ship's designer had considered that function to be the exclusive domain of the environmental VI. Garrus shrugged and followed her out of the office, scooter in tow.

Out in the open, it was shittier.

"How good are the shields?" Shepard asked, straddling the seat.

"It's a security scooter."

"Exactly. 'Security.'"

"That's 'security' as in shoplifters, not paramilitary mechs."

She hummed disapprovingly. "At least we've got the element of surprise on our side."

"It's always on our side. If you'd told me this plan three years ago, I would have been very surprised. Now I'm surprise-proof."

Sliding sliding forward in the seat, she set her omni-tool to override the demand for a passcode. "Then hop on. You can shoot out the cockpit while I keep us from getting shot."

"Or I could drive," he said hopefully, reaching around her for the handlebars.

She blocked him with her elbows. "You've got the rifle, you do the shooting." After a beat she added, "There's nothing wrong with my driving."

Her omni-tool display flashed green as the engine kicked to life. Clearing his throat, Garrus settled in behind her. "Sorry, I think my translator glitched. I could have sworn you said there was nothing wrong with your driving."

With a faint whine, the thrusters lifted them several centimeters off the floor. Shepard snorted and leaned over the handlebars as the scooter began gradually to accelerate. "Very funny. Name one wreck I've gotten us into."

"Are you forgetting the Mako? The Hammerhead? That C-Sec patrol car?"

The scooter surged forward, clearing the barricade and striking the sloped floor on the other side before the thrusters compensated. As the Atlas turned toward them, she replied, "Any crash you can walk away from isn't a real wreck."

Garrus aimed his rifle over her shoulder, ignoring the lurch in his stomach. "Maybe we could raise our standard for success just a little."

"Less whining, more shooting."

He fired the instant the orange bulge of the cockpit rotated into view. Shepard's zigzagging complicated his aim, but he got two more rounds into a spiderweb crack before return fire sprayed just above his fringe.

She veered right around the mech and turned hard to the left, scraping the front of the scooter against the floor. "Hold on," she said, and Garrus obligingly grabbed her as they hooked around the back of the Atlas. It rotated clumsily after them.

They made another more tight circle, just fast enough to stay ahead of a burst of fire, before she said, "Gonna hit the brakes to give you another shot. Ready?"

He raised his rifle and clamped his thighs to the scooter. "Ready."

The scooter bucked with the force of her deceleration. Momentum kept the Atlas turning; its missile flew through the space it had expected them to occupy and blasted a storefront. 

The next missile never launched. Garrus's shot pierced the heart of the spiderweb and the pilot behind it, blasting the canopy apart. The thermal clip could take the heat of one more round, so he fired a followup for good measure.

Shepard blazed upward the moment the scooter came to a halt, knocking out most of the jagged orange shards around cockpit. "Got him," she confirmed. "This one was a salarian."

"You know, it's almost heart-warming to see the races of Omega coming together like this." 

With a grunt, she hauled the dead pilot out of the cockpit and took his place. The Atlas's gripping arm lowered and extended toward Garrus, as if offering an enormous handshake. He climbed aboard and let himself be lifted to the lip of the cockpit.

"My turn to drive?" he asked.

She nodded and hauled herself up to the top of the mech's head. "I'll sling biotics. How much more of a beating can this thing take?"

Leather seat, he noted as he swung into it. The Atlas line must have gone into production before Cerberus switched its recruitment strategy from private-sector perks to indoctrination. "Not much. Jump if you smell smoke."

From the intersection that the atlas had guarded, the walkway branched off at right angles heading port and starboard, with the path ahead ending in a massive glass storefront overlooked by the balcony of the upper level. The branches curved out of sight as they angled upward and inward to reconnect on the upper level, where the boutiques charged obscene prices for designer goods. 

A noise from the balcony drew Garrus's attention. He fired a missile at the white gleam of cracked Cerberus armor, taking out most of the balcony showing debris over the intersection. Blue crackled in his peripheral vision as Shepard shielded them from the mess.

"Company's coming," she said. "On your left."

The Atlas didn't last enough to load another missile, though the few bursts of canon fire he got off mowed down a wave of hijackers caught off-balance by Shepard's shockwave. When the canon jammed and smoked, she caught him up in a biotic charge that rushed them to a safe distance with disorienting speed. The Atlas caught fire behind them in a chain of minor explosions.

In the seconds it took him to get his bearings and find cover, Shepard cracked her knuckles and charged into the next wave of combatants. Fewer than half were caught in the blast that followed; they were getting smarter, or at least quicker to retreat. And they had finally learned not to bother with grenades, Garrus noted.

They were not, however, any better at not holding still long enough for him to line up a headshot, and their efforts not to cluster in range of Shepard made them even easier pickings. The few that attempted to approach from the opposite path didn't seem to realize the lack of adequate cover until it resulted in their catching a projectile with their skulls.

"I got twelve," he announced, keeping his rifle ready in case any stragglers came along. "How'd you do?"

"Hmph. Eight." Shepard's voice was low and mumbly behind him. Her hands rustled at the snack-containing pillow case on his back.

He reached back to touch her and said, "You're cold."

"Core temperature's not playing nice with my L3 implant again. I'll be fine. I just need calories."

More than cold—her fingers were too clumsy to work the knot, and when he turned, he saw that her lips had taken on dusky purple undertones. "Here," he said, opening the pillow case for her. Gel smeared her lips as her shaking hands squeezed a packet of it into her mouth.

After another packet and a series of deep breaths, she no longer trembled. "Okay," she said, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "Let's keep moving."

It was still strange, sometimes, that a blue cast to her skin meant something was wrong. When he first began working for C-Sec, he had wondered if he'd ever feel the same depth of horror at other colors of blood as he did at a crime scene spattered with blue. It was difficult to remember now whether he had, after the macabre rainbows of Omega washed him numb.

"If they got an Atlas aboard," he said, voice low, as they stole up the starboard path, "there's no telling how many hijackers we're dealing with."

"At least they're not a well-equipped army." Shepard halted at the corner when the paths rejoined into a broad walkway. A voice carried from far ahead. "Can you make any of that out?"

"Not any words." Garrus peeked just far enough around the corner to get a view through his visor, which zoomed in on the distant blue life signs of a crowd. The voice belonged to an asari, who was very near a volus with a racing pulse. An assortment of species stood opposite them, most of them with vital signs suggesting panic. A camera was set up nearby, accessorized with what looked like Cerberus tech.

Shepard peered around him. "Hostages?"

"That's what it looks like. If I had to guess, they're broadcasting demands."

"I'm gonna guess the one doing all the talking is in charge." She drummed her fingers against the Graal's grip. "Can you make the shot?"

With the Black Widow, he wouldn't have hesitated. He didn't have the same level of trust in the Viper's accuracy, but the height difference between the asari and the volus at least made it unlikely he'd hit the hostage. In that sense, it wasn't as risky as the shot he'd taken in the med clinic back when they first met, back when he shot first and worried later. She'd looked torn between congratulating and chastising him and had ended up doing both.

He stared down the scope of the Viper. The asari gestured heavily with the hand that held a shotgun but kept her head more or less still. "How long will it take you to charge down there?"

"I can't do it in one go. I'll have to stop and regroup about halfway."

The asari focused a biotic glow around the seals on the volus's suit, and his vitals leapt frantically. "I'm taking it," Garrus decided. He breathed, steadied himself, and squeezed the trigger.

Not a perfect shot—it tore diagonally through her shoulder, shattering the ceramic plating of her armor—but the blue glow vanished as she screamed. 

Shepard charged at an angle to zigzag her way across the hall. Garrus readied the Viper again, but in the pandemonium that erupted, it was impossible to pick out a target. He darted into the cover of the nearest shop doorway, which brought him into slightly better range. Through the scope, he watched Shepard send a flechette burrowing through the asari's chest. 

The glint of a rifle caught his attention. This time he hit the head of the batarian aiming for Shepard.

He broke cover to run into the score of passengers trying to flee. "Get inside!" he barked, gesturing toward the shop. "We're here to rescue you!"

Not all of them obeyed, but enough flowed in the right direction to give him a clear path to Shepard and the three humans she was leading through a biotic dance. It was going about as well as her usual dancing, in that she was confusing her partners and doing considerable damage with her feet. None of them seemed aware of Garrus's presence.

With the Viper in a more comfortable range, he took down two of them after Shepard stunned them with the explosion of her barrier. The third caught her fist with his chest and hit the floor headfirst with a wet, terminal crack.

"Stop panicking!" she bellowed at the passengers who were not following instructions. "I'm Commander Shepard, and I'm taking you to the beach!"

"I'm buying your VI just for the next upgrade," Garrus told her. 

"Not helping, Vakarian."

After herding the passengers together and helping the still-terrified volus to his feet, they hadn't managed to piece together more than that the hijackers had intended to kill them all, one by one, and broadcast their deaths. Watching the recording promised to be more informative than asking questions, so Garrus and Shepard gave up on accomplishing anything more than reassurance as they led the hostages back to the increasingly crowded beach.

"You still haven't fixed this?" a salarian demanded as they turned to leave. "You should be evacuating us!"

Shepard ground her teeth. "We're making progress, and we have no idea what might be outside the ship. Just stay here and stay calm."

When they returned to the promenade, the hijackers' bodies still littered the floor, blood congealing together into dismal shades of brown. Garrus investigated the camera.

"It's still transmitting," he said. Waving a hand in front of the lens, he added, "Hey, Tali, if you're watching, we wouldn't mind backup. I'm sending our coordinates and bearing."

Shepard poked her head into the frame. "Bring your shotgun and Chatika. It's a party."

"Anyway, we're going to see whatever you just saw, assuming you saw it. So we're out." After changing the camera's mode, he patched the recording through to his omni-tool and projected it.

For several seconds, it displayed only terrified hostages and the batarian hijacker irritably attempting to initiate the transmission. Over his shoulder, the asari was visibly impatient.

Something about her niggled at Garrus. As she cleared her throat, he realized that her facial markings were unsettingly similar to Melanis's. Amazing, really, how time didn't dull that sting.

With a satisfied grunt, that batarian moved aside and said, "We're live."

She bared her teeth at the camera. "Attention! This is not an SOS, but a declaration of war. The _Spirit of Talis Fia_ is ours. Do not attempt to reclaim it. By the time you reach us, everyone on board will be dead."

From off-screen came screaming and a scuffle. The asari waited impassively until the other hijackers subdued the source.

"We are not issuing demands," she continued. "We will not negotiate. Negotiations never work out in our favor, after all. No, we will only tell you what will happen, and why you should fear us." Her teeth flashed again. "We are the Scavengers of Omega. The galaxy takes from us and leaves us scraps, so we've learned to live on them. And now we are strong and clever enough to take from you. Yes, all of you who are rich and fat from the spoils of war. Every last one of you who has amassed wealth and fame at our expense."

One of the hostages began an objection, which cut off with a muffled thump.

"You think nothing of us," the asari continued. "Your Commander Shepard murdered thousands of us to restore the tyrant Aria T'Loak to power, as if we were any worse off under Cerberus. She too is aboard. She too will die."

Garrus glanced to his side and found Shepard's face dark and tight and distant. She flinched when he laced his fingers between hers, then squeezed his hand.

"You built the old galaxy on our backs," the asari continued. "In this new galaxy, we'll take what we deserve out of the hides of the undeserving. Death to profiteers!"

At her gesture, a volus was shoved toward her. She caught him and held the pistol to his head with almost casual menace as she said, "This one buys products from the most desperate wretches of Omega for a fraction of their worth, then sells them at an obscene profit to isolated colonies. He strikes deals so that no one in Omega can sell for more, and no one in his colonies can buy for less. What does he deserve?"

The volus attempted to answer and was pistol-whipped.

"What you _all_ deserve," the asari said coolly. "We are many, and none of you are safe. Watch the first of these die, and wonder which of you will be next."

To the volus's rising panic, the seals on his suit began to glow. A shot rang out in the background, and the asari staggered and screamed as her blood sprayed in an arc.

Garrus halted the playback. Shepard was still tense, so he said, "You know, I'd be more sympathetic if their master plan wasn't murdering us all on a live broadcast feed."

She snorted. "Yeah, they lost me around the time they shot up the beach. I'm gonna turn this thing back on." After a final squeeze, she let go of Garrus's hand and walked over to the camera. "We're going to fix this," she said after enabling transmission again. "We just saved those hostages, and we're going to get the rest of them out of here alive, too. Still wouldn't mind backup, Tali."

Gravity pulled Garrus's gaze from her to the face of the dead asari. Melanis had lost her bondmate, a dancer at a club that made the Afterlife look like a family-friendly establishment, to a stray shot in a gang fight, and he had known from the moment she spat the term "collateral damage" that she belonged on his squad. She'd always been so careful to avoid civilian casualties. Always fighting with Ripper over what constituted an acceptable risk.

When he found her, she was dead but still burning. Sidonis's blood would have put her out, but not brought her back. That was the trouble with trying to do right by the dead—it didn't do the dead much good.

He must have stared too long, because Shepard put her hand on his arm and said, "This isn't your fault."

"I know." For a few months, he'd thought he was making a real difference; realizing that he'd had all the impact of a stone thrown into the sea had hollowed him out, left him scrambling to fill the void with rage and cynicism and anything else that didn't make him think. Sometimes he wondered if Shepard realized just how steep a brink she had pulled him back from.

She was too quiet again, too still. Garrus faced her and added, "This isn't _your_ fault, either."

Her hand slid down his arm, but she didn't answer right away. He had just opened his mouth to prompt her when she said, "I didn't help."

"Just because you stopped the Reapers doesn't mean you can fix everything, Shepard. Whatever Omega needs, it's not people like us."

"I know." She rolled her neck, then echoed the popping noise with her knuckles. "Let's see if we can do a little better by the people here."

* * *

"We picked up that transmission," Tali says. "They must have used Cerberus tech for that, too; by the time we managed to trace it, you'd jumped into FTL. I was worried sick."

"Yeah, that happened a little later." Shepard scratches the back of her neck. "You were worried?"

"I wasn't exactly thrilled to find out that you'd been hijacked by terrorists who wanted to murder everyone on camera."

"We beat thresher maws," Garrus points out. "Not to mention those pesky ancient horrors from dark space. Hijackers were almost refreshing after that."

Tali sighs. "We didn't beat thresher maws and Reapers without any armor."

Shepard grins. "That sounds like a challenge. Tell Wrex I've got an idea for next time I visit Tuchanka."

"Tell him yourself," Tali replies. "I'm going to forward this entire conversation to him."

Shepard's eyebrows fly up as she checks the integrity of her neckline. "Wait, are you recording this?"

"Of course. I'll want to watch it later whenever I miss taking suicidal orders from you."

"Send me a copy," says Garrus. "I'll add it to the posterity file."

Tali giggles. "Along with Fat Blasto?"

That vid begins with a view of a datapad, displaying what appears at a glance to be a message from Primarch Victus. A glance is all there's time for before the datapad goes flying out of frame as the machinery begins to beep. After a blur of motion, the visor camera captures a hospital bed and Shepard, splinted and bandaged and stuck full of tubes and generally looking like someone who has no business being alive. Her eyelids flicker.

Garrus says her name in a quietly wrenching voice, setting his hand on a relatively clear patch of her arm. Light reflects from the bleary slits of her eyes. As Garrus leans closer, she rasps a series of noises, most of which his translator does not attempt to interpret but the last few of which come across as, "Blasto, you got _fat_."

At the time he panicked about brain damage; once she was able to form sentences and long-term memories again, he showed her the recording and couldn't stop laughing. 

"Fat Blasto is a masterpiece," he replies. "It belongs in all her biography vids."

Shepard makes a face at him. "I'll make sure _your_ biographers get footage of you pole-dancing with Vega."

"I, uh, don't remember that."

"No surprise, considering you lost the drinking contest beforehand."

As Garrus's forehead plates shift downward, Tali says, "Send me a copy, too."

* * *

She still had dreams about the reactor, blurred with other nightmares. The broken geth rained down around her as she tapped futilely at the console, unable to reroute power, unable to breathe. When she woke, she couldn't shake away the memory of dying in the frigid dark, nor the weight of having condemned so many others to the same fate.

A few thousand in Omega, or a few hundred thousand in Bahak, because the galaxy demanded sacrifice. _Ruthless calculus_ , Garrus had called it, but if Shepard had a better head for calculus, she might have rerouted the power in time, or given sufficient warning to evacuate. All her solutions ended in violence; anything she fixed, she fixed by breaking something else.

For years, she'd tried to tell herself that a soldier was something that could be pointed at bad guys and relied on to shoot, that she was a good soldier because she got the job done, that the broader consequences were not hers to consider. It took Torfan to make her realize that every action she took echoed inside her and never faded, and Torfan and Bahak and Omega rippled through others as pervasively as Mindoir rippled through her. She had sent destructive shockwaves through the galaxy long before she activated the Crucible.

"Shepard," Garrus said. "Where's your head?"

_Letting strange lights rip her apart molecule by molecule so that no one can ever put her back together. Keeping the world turning, unable to block out the screams of everyone ground down in the gears. Hating herself for mourning Miranda most when the implants in her hip seize up. Sinking and pulling him down with her._

Shepard took a sharp breath and narrowed her vision. "Right here."

"Good. My head was getting lonely."

She'd told him about the dreams that haunted her while she was comatose, wistful nightmares of an impossible choice that she wouldn't have to live with. No one, least of all she, knew what had really happened when she reached the Catalyst. Garrus assured her that the ghostly hologram of a child and the choices it offered had been a hallucination at best, or a Reaper trap at worst. Joker, she suspected, might disagree.

Garrus's fingers snapped in front of her face. "Right _here_ ," she said again, shaking her head sharply. "Let's move."

As he started to walk, she frowned and called for him to halt. Kneeling, she examined the spur on his left leg, which was a bit shorter than she remembered and trickling blue blood through a concealed glob. "When did this happen?" she asked.

"When did what happen?" He twisted awkwardly to look. "Oh. Hmm. No telling. I don't have a lot of nerve endings down there."

"We'd better patch you up. We passed a pharmacy on the lower level."

"Good thinking. We're bound to need medi-gel sooner or later."

"Hopefully later."

Past the smoking remains of the Atlas, they entered a spacious shop designed to cater to the specialized personal needs of most intelligent species and an assortment of popular pets. High-contrast color-coding marked the levo- and dextro-exclusive products, with posted reminders that chirality mattered with anything taken internally. The kiosks for the VI doctor were predictably offline.

As Shepard swept medi-gel into the supply pillow case, she said, "We should leave an IOU."

Garrus looked up from squeezing gel over the tip of his spur. "Yeah. I'll see if there's anything else useful in stock."

The datapad on the counter wasn't online, of course, but it seemed as good a place as any to leave a list of what they took. Shepard had just typed in the beginning of a note when a noise from the back of the shop grabbed her attention. 

A wild-eyed salarian in civvies stood in the back doorway with a Carnifex raised in his jittery hand.

"Easy," said Shepard, hands up. "We're not hijackers. We're _stopping_ the hijackers. You'll get paid for this, Spectre's hon—"

The shot grazed her upper arm, ripping her tracksuit. She hurled the datapad like a biotically charged discus. The salarian went down in a green spray.

Garrus lowered his Viper. "Did you just decapitate that guy with a datapad?"

She squinted. "Mostly."

"I love you."

After blowing him a kiss, she daubed medi-gel on her arm, then retrieved the datapad and wiped it off on a clean part of the salarian's shirt. "We should check out the back room," she said. "He didn't shoot until I brought up Spectres."

"Ah, smuggling! That's what this vacation was missing."

"I wonder how normal people have vacations."

A thumping noise put Shepard on her guard. Graal readied, she kicked the door fully open and peered around the corner.

Amid a pile of unmarked lockboxes was one that tipped suspiciously back and forth. Garrus overrode the lock as Shepard remarked, "Bet you that one doesn't have a money-back guarantee."

"Cutting corners is the smugglers' way." Cautiously, he opened the latch and stared dumbfounded at the contents.

Shepard pressed forward for a look but stopped when the box tipped over. Out tumbled a wiggling, yellow-gray mass, all head and no neck, with long arms and stubby legs, and round red eyes gleaming above a short snout. When it let out a noise somewhere between a squeak and a growl, her brain finally accepted that it was a baby krogan.

"Holy shit," she said.

Garrus prodded its exposed belly with the filed tip of a talon. It rolled up with a squeal and caught him with its fat little hands. "Uh," he managed at last. "None of the others are moving."

Bracing themselves, they opened the rest of the lockboxes and breathed in unison relief when the contents proved not to be dead infants. 

"Drug-smuggling makes sense," Garrus said, resealing a bag of red sand. "That's just your friendly neighborhood underworld activity. There is no damn good reason to have a baby locked up in a box."

"Yeah, I changed my mind about the IOU." Shepard slipped the datapad into a pillow case. "We can check this for evidence later, maybe find out where this little guy came from."

Garrus poked the krogan's belly again, eliciting a delighted shriek. "Smart money's on Tuchanka, and there's no way this guy was acting alone. I'd hate to be in the shoes of the kidnappers after Wrex finds out."

"Why the hell would anyone kidnap a krogan baby? Are they trying to start a goddamn war?" Shaking her head, Shepard caught one of the krogan's toes and wiggled it. It kicked and cooed. "Poor little guy. How long were you locked up in there? Are you hungry?"

"I'm going to say yes." Garrus scooped the krogan under its and arms and stood, grimacing. "Huh, he's heavier than he looks."

"Are you sure it's a 'he'?"

"No idea."

"Let's check." Shepard took the krogan, which was indeed heavier than it looked, and set it down on its back on the office desk. She caught a wriggling leg in either hand. Garrus peered down over her shoulder, his visor near her ear; she could hear its tiny processors whirring. "So. Uh. It's definitely a..." She cast a hopeful glance sideways.

"You're the xenophile, Shepard. You tell me."

"And what do you think you are?"

He flared his mandibles. "You made the pass. That makes me more of a situational xenophile."

With a snort, she tipped the krogan sideways, in hopes it would look less ambiguous at that angle. "It's definitely _internal_ ," she said at length.

"I'm not sticking a finger in there."

"Neither am I." Shepard let go of the krogan's legs, getting a kick in the wrist on her trouble. Her hand hovered briefly over her omni-tool before she thought better of it. "I'm not looking up 'krogan genitals,' either."

"Well, I suppose it doesn't matter."

"Right. We've got a hijacking to finish thwarting."

They stared at each other for several seconds, until Shepard had to catch the krogan before it tumbled over the edge of the desk. She was a moment too late to stop it from cramming a fistful of wrapped candies into its mouth, wrappers and all.

"I'll make a sling," Garrus offered.

* * *

"And that's it?" Tali asks. "You just took the baby with you? To fight hijackers?"

Shepard nods. "We couldn't just leave it behind."

"And for a krogan," Garrus adds, "a combat zone is a nurturing environment."

Eyes narrowed, Tali types, then waits for a few seconds. She looks back up with a shrug. "Wrex says you're right. Now he's sending me the lyrics of a traditional krogan battlefield lullaby. The chorus is firing an assault rifle into the air."

"I always figured a krogan lullaby was a shot of ryncol," Shepard says.

Tali glances back down at her console. "Apparently the ryncol goes without saying."

"As long as we're on the subject of needing a drink," Garrus says, "let's see what's on that datapad." He shuffles to the supply pillow case, keeping his lower half too low for Shepard's omni-tool to pick up. When he returns, he's already flicking through files with his finger.

When he looks up, he says, "I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that there are slavers in the Terminus Systems who think a krogan slave would make a valuable status symbol."

Tali bristles. "Are there names?"

"Codes and nicknames. I'll forward everything. Liara should know what they mean." He taps the screen several times. "So far I haven't found any record of how the baby left Tuchanka in the first place. That salarian obviously wasn't with the hijackers, but I'd say he benefited from the lack of security measures. And then he got a pretty nasty shock from it."

Tali draws a longer finger across her throat.

"That, too."

Shepard says, "Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still an asshole."

* * *

The sling was simple enough to improvise from a product meant for ferrying little humans, and Garrus looped it around himself without giving Shepard a chance to offer. As much as the krogan was likely to enjoy charging with her into an ambush, it was better off at a safe sniping distance. The krogan settled contentedly against his keel and set about trying to rend his shirt with its blunt little claws. 

Staring down an aisle of nutritional products, Shepard asked, "What does it eat?"

"Levo food." At her glower, he added, "You've spent more time on Tuchanka than I have."

"With adult krogans. I don't even know a lot about what humans babies eat, honestly. I didn't have any younger siblings."

"Didn't you grow up on a colony? With livestock?"

"Right, where I learned important lessons about making sure the calves don't grab the bucket while you're milking the adults."

"That's relevant."

"What about turian babies?"

Garrus considered. "If you don't have baby food, you can chew regular food and spit that into its mouth."

"I'm gonna go ahead and veto that."

They continued to stare at the lines of jars, which accounted for the possibility of almost any other species of baby being aboard and hungry.

"Did you know there's no native krogan word for 'poison'?" Garrus said at length. "When I was with C-Sec, I watched one eat half a kilo of omni-gel."

"And here Wrex used to complain about the food on the _Normandy_." Shepard scanned the shelf, gnawed her lip, and finally scooped up half a dozen jars of Fishdog Food Factory Nutritious Levo Mash ("Now with flavor!"). They clattered heavily into the pillow case with the energy gel. 

She picked up another and twisted off the lid, releasing the hideous scent of dead things that were never meant to be dead together. Judging by Shepard's expression, it didn't smell any better to people who ate levo food.

Garrus lifted the krogan out of the sling and set it on the counter, in case it shared her feelings and felt the need to spit out its meal. "Maybe we should let it defeat the mash first in single combat."

"Ha, ha." With steely resolve, Shepard dipped a little plastic spoon into the mash and maneuvered it toward the krogan's mouth. "Open up, buddy, here comes the frigate!"

The krogan chomped on the spoon, made a thoughtful burbling noise, and swallowed the spoon whole.

"You're supposed to eat the cargo, not the whole frigate!" she told it.

"Well, it doesn't seem any worse off," Garrus said.

Shepard snatched the jar before the krogan could devour it, too. "I'll just pour this in your mouth," she decided, and ended up in a tug-of-war with the krogan as it grabbed the source of the chunky waterfall above it. It swallowed noisily. 

"Gimme another jar," she called to Garrus. "I need to distract it."

The krogan consumed the contents of two more jars, losing interest in the empty one as soon as more mash arrived to take its place. After the third, it seemed contentedly full enough to let go of the jar without much of a fight. 

Shepard watched it critically for signs of gastrointestinal disagreement. "Should we burp it?"

"I'm more worried about the other end," Garrus replied. "Hang on, I'm going to find diapers."

When he returned, Shepard had picked up the krogan and was staring at its backside in rapt delight. "Check this out," she said before he could ask, and held the krogan up to his eye level. As her hands kneaded its armpits, its fat little tail wagged furiously.

Garrus watched in mandible-slackening fascination. "Does Grunt's do that? Does _Wrex's_?"

"Never noticed if they did. Their armor must hold it still."

"Almost a shame to cover that up," Garrus said as he fastened the diaper. It had been designed for humans, but krogan anatomy didn't seem to be entirely beyond its adjustable abilities. "Next time we see Wrex, we'll have to try tickling him."

"So you're saying we should bring a drum or two of ryncol. Got it." Shepard turned the krogan around so that it faced her. "And we can take _you_ to see Wrex as soon as we kill all the bad guys. He'll get you back to your family, and whoever took you will _pay_ for it, yes, they will." With a fond smile, she headbutted it, so gently that it was almost a nuzzle.

The krogan shrieked, giggled, and smashed its forehead into her face with a cracking noise.

Her neck snapped back. One of her hands shot to her nose; the other lobbed the krogan at Garrus, who caught it against his side and said, "Are you okay?"

"Fuuuhgg!" Red blood poured between her fingers as she released a series of noises that baffled his translator. He'd set down the krogan and dug out some medi-gel before her voice came through in real words, albeit thick and nasal ones: "Right in my fucking _nose_." 

He reached for her with the medi-gel, but she held up her free hand to halt him. "Make sure it looks right first. I don't want it to heal so crooked I can't breathe through it." After a deep breath, she pulled her hand away from a remarkably swollen, bloody mess.

Garrus hesitated. "What's it supposed to look like, again?"

Her watering eyes narrowed. "How the hell do you not know what my nose looks like?"

"I know that it sticks out of your face, just not, you know, in detail."

"Just tell me when it looks straight." Gritting her teeth, she set her fingers on either side of the lump. Her sharp push had little apparent effect beyond making her wobble and swear breathlessly.

"Ah, there. I think." Garrus daubed medi-gel over her nose and watched it seal tight against her skin, stiffening the injured area into what looked more or less like a straight line. Shepard inhaled experimentally as the krogan giggled at her, its forehead streaked with her blood.

She shook her head at it and wiped an unpleasant mix of fluids from her face. "Lay off the friendly fire, kid."

* * *

"You hardly notice the bend," Tali offers. "Remember the long scar you had across your face when we first met? It's much less obvious than that."

"I miss that scar." Shepard runs a finger along its lost outline, avoiding the still-tender bridge of her nose. "I got it on Torfan." She still doesn't like to talk about Torfan—still winces when she's praised for it—but she needs to carry it with her to illuminate the line between necessity and atrocity. Maybe Cerberus guessed at the scar's significance when they rebuilt her face without it. Now she has only the narrow cracks where her flesh still struggles to reject her cybernetic parts.

Garrus's arm slides around her hip. She used to have a scar there, too, from the batarian slaver who would have dragged her from the barn if she hadn't been lucky with a bolt gun. He understands; she explained, as best she could, after she refused to let Sidonis become his Torfan. They both understand what it is to give up the fleeting satisfaction that revenge promises, knowing none may ever come without it, and find the lack worthwhile. Mercy is less a virtue sometimes, and more a selfish necessity.

"Sorry," Tali says, "I didn't realize. I know you don't like to talk about that."

The list has grown long: don't talk about Mindoir, don't talk about Torfan, don't talk about Alchera or Virmire or Bahak or the geth or EDI or the weeks she spent comatose after the war. She carries it all under her lab-grown skin, woven beneath the damaged implants that kept her from another stint as meat and tubes. Ashes to ashes, but she still burns.

And she cooks, and he paints, and it's all right, sometimes.

"Well, _we_ can talk about it," she says. "Not right this minute, but the three of us can, in general."

Without her mask, Tali's face broadcasts emotions. Even her posture radiates a half-pleased, half-protective warmth, but she keeps her tone light: "Next time you two are on Rannoch, we'll all have tea and talk about our feelings."

"Is that a threat?" asks Garrus.

"Of course not," she replies. "When I remind you that my shotgun is for people who don't share, _that's_ a threat."

* * *

"Is it just me," Shepard said as they passed by the corpses of the hijackers near the end of the promenade, "or is their shitty Cerberus gear getting shittier?"

"That's been my impression." Garrus halted by one of the humans, she noted, not the asari. "This guy's only got the top half, and he would have done better without it. Looks like your fist drove the ceramic into his chest."

Shepard knelt for a better look at the asari. She had proven sturdier, though her armor hadn't done much to protect her from a weapon designed to pierce a thresher maw's hide. "This one was obviously important enough to get her pick of the gear. The others... Let's just say that I wouldn't have gone hand-to-hand with them if I hadn't watched their shotguns jam."

"It's comforting to think that some of your risks might be calculated." Garrus nudged a gauntlet with his foot and watched it split open along a hairline crack. "They threw the Guardians at us up front and must have figured they'd put us down hard. Maybe by the time we get to the bridge, we'll be fighting elderly hijackers in their underwear."

The krogan made a loudly inquisitive noise and squirmed in its sling. Garrus pressed a hand to it and added, "Since I'm fighting with a handicap, that would only seem fair."

Shepard tapped the krogan's nose, eliciting a giggly shriek. She withdrew her finger before the krogan's thick nubs of fingers could clasp it in place. "Is the kid gonna get in your way too much?"

"It's nothing I shouldn't be able to work around. And it's not like we can strap it to you."

The krogan would almost certainly have enjoyed charging into the thick of danger, but this was beside the point. "Fair enough," she conceded, trying not to dwell on the idea of the krogan throwing off her balance while she was already struggling against malfunctioning muscles. Not that the krogan potentially interfering with a carefully scoped shot would be much better.

They had almost made their way to the service elevator when Shepard stopped and requested the krogan. Looking mildly suspicious, Garrus handed it over. His facial plates shifted more intently as she held the krogan level with her head.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

Shepard didn't look away from the krogan's wide-set eyes. "Establishing dominance."

"Pretty sure you're thinking of varren, Shepard."

"Hey, which of us is an honorary krogan?" After a deep breath, she drove her forehead against the baby's with what she hoped was the right level of force to make her point. Headbutting an adult krogan felt like barreling headfirst into a door; with an infant, the feeling was more akin to catching a boot with her forehead.

The krogan fell silent for long enough that she almost worried she'd stunned it, but then it clapped and giggled. With surprising agility, it arched in her hands and rammed its forehead into hers. Amazing, really, how much force such a small thing could exert.

"That's right, kiddo," she said, as her vision swam gently. "We go for the forehead, not the nose."

It gurgled at her. Garrus caught the hand it extended toward her hair. 

"Satisfied?" he said dryly.

"Yep." As Garrus returned the krogan to the sling, she added, "You know, I'm surprised we haven't hit another wave of hostiles. They know we interrupted their murder performance art."

"Maybe they're busy trying to take the life support offline."

A crack about regretting their failure to bring along an engineer didn't have even the ghost of humor left in it by the time it reached her tongue, so she swallowed it along with the lump in her throat that reminded her of how it felt to asphyxiate. "Or maybe they're laying an ambush. If we're dealing with a small army, they'll be a lot more dangerous attacking all at once than in squads."

"If we're dealing with a small army, I'd guess the bridge is pretty crowded right now." Garrus gazed wistfully at the boutiques. "It's a shame none of them decided to hold the line here. There's a _haberdashery_."

"Damn shame," Shepard agreed. They had been lucky so far, with the odds tipped in their favor by untrained fighters and malfunctioning equipment. With enough weapons firing in an enclosed space, their luck would quickly run out. "We're going to need to surprise them again."

"I'm vetoing the scooter."

Shepard hit the button to call the service elevator. "It would barely fit in the elevator, anyway," she said, positioning herself in case the car arrived full of hijackers. "And I never like to pull the same trick... shit."

The doors opened not on an ambush, but on an empty shaft. Shepard leaned forward far enough to confirm that the missing care was neither directly above nor below. The bottom of the shaft was too dark to rule out its having crashed at the bottom. 

Reaching around to the left of the entrance, she felt the narrow rungs of a maintenance ladder. No doubt it ran all the way to the bridge, and no doubt it led directly to a hail of gunfire.

"I'm going to guess," said Garrus, "that they figured out how we could get to the bridge."

She drummed her fingers against the frame of the elevator doors. "Gotta say, I'm not too excited about climbing into an ambush."

The krogan made a noise that suggested it was excited about everything. 

"There should be maintenance access ducts," Garrus said. "But the access points aren't going to be out in the open on a ship like this, and we can't afford to waste too much time looking after we've already—"

Shepard's hand shot out to steady him as the ship lurched. The muscles in her hip twitched and locked with terribly timing; she gritted her teeth as she tried to fall against the wall rather than through the open elevator doors. Garrus's arm hooked through hers and pulled her to safer ground.

Swearing under her breath, she rode out the seizure until her legs returned to her conscious control. Her thighs still trembled as she rushed down the walkway toward the large window mounted on the port side wall, with Garrus keeping pace beside her.

The stars were redshifted.

"Either they hacked the navigational VI from the bridge," Garrus said, "or at least a few of them are in the engine room. Either way, they're a lot smarter than I hoped."

The first time Shepard had seen the effects of traveling faster than light, she'd been on a military ship headed to Earth with a handful of other survivors, en route to an aunt and uncle she'd never met on a planet she'd never seen, with nothing left of her life on Mindoir but her name. The crimson lights had still been beautiful. "I can't imagine any reason I'd like that they've taken us into FTL."

"No, I think we're back at crashing this thing into the nearest planet. They must have figured out that's the only way they'll be able to kill everyone with us around." He paused. "So the good news is that we're being taken seriously as a threat."

Shepard turned from the stars and led the way back to the elevator. "That service elevator should run to the engine room. How do you feel about climbing down into an ambush?"

"Fantastic. I've really missed taking suicidal orders from you." Garrus consulted his omni-tool, patting the krogan absently with his right hand when he wasn't tapping at the interface. "Looks like they've pointed us at Haza. We've got less than forty-five minutes until it's too late to avoid impact."

She sped up. 

With her omni-tool for light, Shepard pulled herself onto the maintenance ladder and began her descent. Garrus followed more slowly than she expected; when she asked, he replied, "It keeps grabbing the rungs. Little guy's got a hell of a grip."

"Try wrestling a jar away from it sometime."

"I'm just hoping it doesn't go for my fringe."

She moved as quickly as could without becoming unsure of her footing, trying not to count off seconds in her head. When her foot moved to what should have been the next rung and instead found a flat surface, she instinctively tightened her grip on the rails. Her right arm spasmed. 

Twisting her left wrist as far as she could without compromising her hold, she shined the beam down and found the floor. No, not the floor—the elevator car, which looked solid enough from the outside but had probably fared worse within. She stepped out onto it, wary of whatever was threatening to go wrong with her limbs.

"Found the elevator," she called up the shaft. The access hatch resisted her efforts to pry it open until she applied biotics. 

Below, the light from her omni-tool bounced from a cracked, uneven floor. At least no one appeared to have been aboard the elevator until it went into freefall.

Arm still twitching faintly, she sat down with her legs dangling into the hatch and slid forward. It wasn't much of a drop, and the landing shouldn't have been a problem, which intensified her disorientation when her head twitched backward against the edge of the hatch on her way down. She found herself flat on her back on the shattered floor below, skull throbbing.

"Shepard?" Garrus called down, on the edge of panic.

She groaned. "Watch the last step. It's a doozy."

"What the hell is a doozy?"

"Not a concussion, probably."

With a noise of exasperated concerned, Garrus sped up his descent. By the time he reached the bottom, chastising the krogan every few steps, Shepard had sat up and begun to assess the damage to the back of her head. No blood, but a bruise seemed inevitable.

Garrus's hand rested over hers against her scalp. "Implants acting up again?"

She scowled but didn't knock his hand away. "I'm fine."

"Let me make sure you're not concussed."

"If my head stayed intact when I hit Alchera, a little tumble down an elevator shaft isn't going to break it."

"Not to downplay the hardness of your head, but I'm pretty sure your helmet had something to do with that. Just let me check." He shined the beam from his omni-tool into her eyes. "Tell me what the asari do wrong with your food." 

"What don't they? They make saag paneer with fucking blue cheese. Tandoori nathak with buckwheat noodles and sausage gravy. That's not 'human fusion,' it's _shit_."

He nodded approvingly and turned the light off. "You're fine."

* * *

"I worried terribly when you jumped into FTL," Tali says. 

"We were headed for Haza," Shepard replies, unable to suppress the apology in her tone.

"I didn't know that. And I was worried about the two of you, not just Rannoch."

"Were you more worried about us than Rannoch?" Garrus asks, fluttering his mandibles.

"Of course not." 

"Ouch."

"Rannoch is the homeworld my people have dreamed of reclaiming for centuries. And Rannoch doesn't ask me to play favorites with ridiculous questions."

Shepard adds, "Rannoch's also got fewer bugs on it."

Garrus shoots her a look. "What are you implying?"

"Have you forgotten about the plate mites? Because I'm the one who's had more traumatic head injuries, and I sure haven't."

Tali's tone is one of of fascinated horror: "Plate mites?"

Pulling his mandibles in tight, Garrus glowers at Shepard's wrist. "Let's just get back on topic."

* * *

The elevator doors refused to open. After several seconds' work with his omni-tool, which he had to keep at an angle well outside the krogan's grasping range, Garrus said, "They haven't managed to secure it. I think they've just cut the power."

Shepard cracked her knuckles. "The only ones left now must be the ones who are clever in really stupid ways. Stand back." As Garrus complied, she wrapped a pair of flechettes in a biotic field and slung into the seam of the door, then sent a shockwave into them. The resulting explosion blew a hole through the center of the door and blasted debris back at them, which she repelled with a barrier.

Panicked shouts suggested that the hijackers on the other side were fleeing to regroup. Using the remains of the door for cover, Shepard and Garrus advanced and peered into the room beyond.

The immediate area was clear of hostiles, who must have run down the curving hall that presumably led to the drive core; the walls interfered with Garrus's visor too much to verify. They couldn't have gone the other direction, as that way lay an airlock. Lockers lined the far wall, and much of the room's space was taken up by a massive control console. Its main screen flickered above a mess of severed wires.

Garrus's heart sank the length of his keel. "Clever in really stupid ways. They've just made sure I can't override their navigation."

"Try."

Shepard's tone brooked no argument, so he positioned himself at the console as she stood guard by the passage. A few minutes' educated guesswork brought the VI crackling into visibility, scrambled beyond recognition. It growled the same distorted word over and over, something like "input," until sound and projection spiraled away like water down a drain. Sparks leapt between the frayed ends of the wires.

"How fast can you get it back online?" she asked.

"It's not coming back online, Shepard. They ripped out a few too many important bits."

"Proud graduates of the James Vega School of Hacking." She let out one of those strange human sighs that made her lips flap. "Could we use central control to divert power from the engines?"

"I'm no expert on volus commercial ship design, but yeah, that should do the trick. We'd just have to fight our way to the bridge and take control in—" he checked the corner of his visor display— "twenty-two minutes."

"If we blow up the FTL drive core—"

"We'd have to be out of our damn minds." 

"Condition met."

"We'd also kill everyone on the ship." As she pinched the skin between her eyebrows, he gave voice to the stupid, desperate idea rattling around his brain: "There should be maintenance panels on the outside of the ship that give direct access to the fuel injectors. If we cut the fuel to one of the thrusters, the spin should knock us off-course, and the failsafes should kick in to counteract our FTL momentum. Assuming we don't blow up."

She was already in motion toward the far wall. "Then that's the plan. You think of any better ideas between here and the airlock, let me know."

"Not sure if you've noticed, Shepard, but we're a little short on engineers today." The krogan bounced against Garrus's chest as he kept pace with her. He braced a hand over it to keep it from squirming out of the sling. "Hence the potential for blowing up."

She pulled open a locker and began to glow. Twisting little pockets of space, she drew several wrenches and screwdrivers into a slow orbit of emptiness, which she sent floating a safe distance across the room. The krogan squealed and stretched its stubby arms toward them with a complete lack of spatial awareness.

A blip of a shockwave leapt from her palm, and the tools fused spectacularly into slag.

"If I can't get the thrusters offline, _controlled_ biotic detonations are the back-up plan," she said, reaching into the locker. Her emphasis did not put him at ease. "Here, help me get into a suit."

There were three to choose from: one salarian-shaped, and two meant for asari. The asari suits were snug and loose in the wrong places, but Shepard crammed herself into one regardless. Garrus checked and rechecked the suit's seals until she pushed his hands away and said, "Eighteen minutes. If we get company, give 'em the full Shepard-Vakarian hospitality package."

He meant to pat her arm but ended up gripping it. The only thing he could think to say that she wouldn't argue with was, "Don't blow yourself up, Shepard."

"Don't get shot, Garrus." She pressed her forehead to his, then had to rescue several tools from the krogan.

Seventeen minutes left, and she stood in the airlock with a toolbox and the same stiff, determined, no-I-am-not-thinking-about-getting-spaced-why-would-you-say-that posture she'd brought to the geth dreadnought. They double-checked the magnets in her boots and the communication link they'd established between her helmet and his visor. Fifteen minutes.

"For the record," Garrus said, "you're crazy."

"No argument here." Shepard took a long, loud breath. "Do it."

He hit the button and watched the air rush out around her into the redshifted vacuum. Her boots held.

Watching her walk away wracked his nerves, so he set up behind the control console with a clear view of the rest of the room and a straight shot to the passage leading to the drive core. A bit of trial-and-error determined the least potentially disastrous arrangement of rifle, thermal clips, and krogan. His visor picked up five heat signatures approaching, two human, two turian, and one asari. His trigger finger itched.

Shepard's voice crackled through the comm link: "Never been this close to an active thruster this big. It's... pretty amazing. Bet I'd be going deaf if we were in any kind of atmosphere."

"We've got at least ten minutes until that's an issue."

"You're always a ray of sunshine, Garrus." She breathed more loudly, perhaps trying to pick up speed. "I think I see an access panel."

The heat signatures slowed their approach in the hall. One peeked around the edge of the doorway, and Garrus summarily shot its source in the forehead. The other signatures grew agitated.

As he shot the hand that fired an assault rifle blindly into the room, he heard, "How're you holding up?"

"Don't worry about me, Shepard. I've got a bottleneck, a decent rifle, and a stash of ammo. You could almost feel sorry for these bastards." He spotted the blue flicker of biotics at the room's entrance and dropped the asari before she could unleash her attack.

"Just like old times, huh?" A grunt of effort suggested that Shepard was forcing open the access panel. "Try not to catch a rocket with your face."

As his enemies argued, Garrus popped in a new thermal clip. "Wouldn't dream of it. Twice would make me look desperate for attention."

A grenade flew in an awkward angle. He tucked his head down against the krogan as the blast went off on the far end of the room. A tiny hand grabbed his left mandible.

"I don't know what the hell I'm looking at here," said Shepard. "I'm going Vega on it."

Garrus tried not to visualize this. The krogan had a remarkable grip for an infant; when the heat signatures began to move before he'd freed himself, he supported the baby with his arm in order to raise his head. It bellowed laughter into his ear.

White armor gleamed under the emergency lights as its wearer tucked and rolled to the other side of the entrance. A sharp yank to Garrus's mandible sent his shot into the wall. He swore.

"Still good?" Shepard asked.

"Nothing I can't handle." He dangled a thermal clip in front of the krogan, which latched on to the shiny new toy. Flaring his mandibles to make sure they both still worked, he settled back into a sensible position, rifle steady.

A turian rushed in from either side of the hallway entrance, zigging and zagging as they sprayed fire. He ignored the impacts against the console and waited. When their paths aligned, he took a shot that ripped through the chest of one and on into the other. Both went down.

"Ha!" he crowed. "Two in one shot!"

"Just so you know, I'm counting the thruster as ten." Shepard's voice sounded tight; they had two minutes before the point of no return. "I'm through to... some kind of hose. Can't cut it. Brace yourself; I'm breaking out the back-up plan."

He could imagine her now, backlit by blue fire, floating the contents of the toolbox into the abused remains of the access panel. What was the range on that shockwave she favored? Was there any cover she could take, or was she alone and exposed in the face of an explosion that might, for all they knew, rip apart the hull?

"Shepard—"

The ship spun hard to the left, hurling Garrus into the wall. The impact knocked his rifle loose from his hand, but it failed to fall; centrifugal motion pinned it in place long enough for him to regain his grip. The krogan squealed gleefully into his chest.

With a shuddering thump, the ship bucked and sent him clattering into the console. Artificial gravity couldn't keep up, and down tilted toward the far wall.

A blue spot on his visor drew his attention to the last surviving attacker sliding past the door, wrist still spurting blood. The vitals were falling toward shock, but to be certain, Garrus squeezed off a round. Another jolt from the thrusters spoiled his headshot but not his kill.

There was too much ship between him and Shepard for his visor to pick up any sign of her. Another jerk to the left knocked him off the console, but this time gravity prevailed. He hit the floor with the krogan on top of him.

Maybe the hijackers had taken everything offline, even the emergency systems. They didn't seem that technically adept, but the failsafe should have already kicked in. Maybe the ship would spin madly through the Veil until the fuel ran out or the drive core discharged into the hull or—

The ship bucked again, this time from the front backward. The emergency lights flickered. Speakers growled and sputtered. Through the airlock window, the red leeched from the stars.

"Shepard." Garrus fumbled with his visor, trying to convince himself he'd accidentally disabled the audio. "Shepard!"

In the midst of heavy static he heard a groan, followed by swearing, panting, and finally breathy laughter. "Still here, Garrus. That was one hell of a ride."

* * *

Tali rubs her forehead as if doing battle with a headache. Each syllable comes out clipped and precise: "You are extremely fortunate that you didn't blow up. You could have easily caused a meltdown in the ship's reactor."

"I never said it was a good plan," Garrus points out.

"And I figured 'probably get us killed' was better than 'definitely get us killed.'" Shepard scratches the back of her neck, then leans forward and bats her eyelashes. "But maybe I should've brought you instead, Tali."

Garrus makes a mock-affronted noise. "Oh, so that's how it is? One look at a giant thruster, and suddenly your favorite ride can't satisfy you anymore?"

"Well, you're pretty good at calibrating," Shepard replies, "but when it comes to momentum—"

Cheeks dark, Tali clears her throat. "I'm still recording. Do you really want this stupid innuendo preserved for posterity?"

* * *

Shepard didn't realize how shaky she was until she stepped out of the magnetized boots and had to hold Garrus's arm for balance. The krogan intercepted and devoured, wrapper and all, the first packet of energy gel that he offered her; on the second try, once he'd set the krogan on the floor, her numb fingers squeezed the contents into her mouth almost faster than she could swallow.

Two gel packets and a thousand calories later, she stopped shivering and leaned against Garrus's chest. His blunted talons stroked her hair. 

"Biotic bonk," she said. "Remember that barrier Jack put up at the Collector base? Imagine it a lot smaller, and imagine the swarms are pieces of what used to be inside the access panel." There had been a protracted moment when the thruster seemed ready to turn and bathe her in exhaust hot enough to melt the ship, but the gases feeding into it had stopped mixing before it cracked loose. After that, molten shrapnel and a wildly bucking ship were almost a relief.

There hadn't been any peace in that moment. Her body still thrummed in defiance of death, here, now, or ever; death had taken and taken and taken but it would not take her again, not today. _Fuck you,_ sang her pulse, _I'm alive._

Garrus's thumb circled the implant at the base of her skull. "I shot two of them at once."

"I heard. No injuries?"

"Of course not. Nearly lost a mandible to the kid, though. We need to teach it firefight etiquette."

She reached up to slide her hands along the sides of his face, feeling his mandibles flutter. Her fingertips lingered as she said, in a huskier tone than she'd intended, "All intact." Between the fever-heat of his body and the adrenaline coursing through hers, she was having a hard time convincing herself not to pounce on him right there in the corpse-strewn wreckage of the engine room. _Fuck you, I'm alive._

But the ship was still hijacked, and even incompetent hijackers could eventually wreak havoc on the life support. With a deep sigh, she let her hands fall and added, "As soon as we save this ship, I'm going to lose count of how many heatsinks I pop."

It was a damn shame turians didn't blush. "I, uh, hope I'm invited."

Grinning, she slugged him in the arm and went to retrieve the krogan, which had squirmed its way into one of the pillow cases. Its lips were smeared with energy gel, and only two packets had survived the carnage; on the bright side, it was bound to be sleepy after a meal like that.

"Hey," she said, picking it up, "I'm in charge, remember? You have to respect my headbutting and not eat all the snacks or grab faces during a shootout."

The krogan gurgled. 

Headbutting it still felt like all the force of a full-grown krogan impossibly compressed into an area the size of her fist, but the warmth of accomplishment made up for the moment of dizziness. It also distracted from the lingering ache in the back of her skull.

"You know," Garrus said, "you could let the guy with the chitinous forehead do the headbutting."

"Nuh-uh. Kids need stability, right? I wouldn't want to confuse it about who's the dominant headbutting battlemaster." She tucked her hands under its armpits and bounced it, eliciting a squeal of delight. Her voice rose to a near-squeak: " _Who's_ your dominant headbutting battlemaster? _Who's_ your—"

"Shepard, my translator's throwing errors."

Laughing, she tucked the krogan back into his sling. "There. Now it's going to be on its best behavior as we storm the bridge and mop up the rest of the Scavengers."

"Here's hoping they didn't actually bring an army. Did Wrex ever tell you about the time he watched hundreds of klixen take down a thresher maw?"

"What I'm getting out of that," Shepard replied, "is that we hope klixen are better at teamwork than these assholes."

Ascending the ladder in the elevator shaft was slower than the descent had been, as the consequences of a misstep were much more severe. On the ship's exterior, when a single twitch would have been enough to disrupt her barrier and leave her at the mercy of the debris, her implants hadn't seized. If she lived hot and furious enough, perhaps, she couldn't freeze up. Or perhaps it was real fear, uncomplicated by the promise of relief in death, that kept her focused. 

She could puzzle through it later, the next time she spiraled into her thoughts. For now, she had to take one rung at a time.

"Shepard," Garrus said from just below her, "I think this is an access duct."

Angling the beam of her omni-tool to light his way, she watched him work at a seam in the wall to the right of the ladder. The krogan fussed and tried to grab his hands whenever he leaned too far forward, but its movements were slower, suggesting a gradual arc toward naptime. It jolted alert with a cry when Garrus finally pulled the panel free of the wall, but it settled quickly when no equally intriguing noises followed.

Carefully, mindful of the krogan's tendency to grab, Garrus shifted himself into the duct. "It's plenty wide," he reported, with a slight echo. "I have no idea where it goes, but any path up probably gets us to the bridge."

"I like those odds better than a frontal assault. For all we know, they've mined the top of the shaft." Shepard climbed down to the level of the duct and eased her way sideways from the ladder, letting Garrus serve as an anchor. The tunnel wasn't quite wide enough for them to advance abreast, nor for them to walk instead of crawl, but they could see around each other and alternate leading without any contortionist maneuvers.

Before long they came to a fork in the passage, where each side led into the dark beyond the range of their omni-tools's beams without any sign of curving or sloping. "You've spent more time on volus ships," Shepard said. "What does your gut say?"

"Right," he replied, quickly enough that he couldn't have let himself get caught up thinking about it. "Though it might just be because that's the mandible that isn't sore right now."

"Good enough for me." She crawled backwards to slip around him. "Lead the way, Garrus. I trust your gut."

A few meters down that path, he slowed and halted.

"You okay?" she asked.

He grunted and reached back awkwardly to press his hand just below the base of his right spur. "I should have made sure they installed a model that doesn't mind crawling through maintenance ducts. That was an oversight on my part."

Shepard scooted forward far enough to reach his leg and massaged either side of his knee, pressing hard against the plates. It had been a while since his synthetic parts had given him trouble, but the memory of what to do was still in her fingertips. He made a low, heavily flanged noise, almost a purr. 

It helped, she thought, to have someone who was broken in so many of the same ways.

"Thanks," he said, "I should be good now." Shepard moved back to give him room to stretch and flex his leg. "Let's move."

The tunnel branched again, and this time Garrus pulled left. For a long time, the path led straight away without curving or branching, and the only sounds were their shuffling, the only light the dancing beams from their omni-tools.

"Ladder ahead," Garrus said, with undisguised relief. "We're going up."

She clapped him on the back. "Hell of a gut you've got, Vakarian."

"My gizzard was the envy of my graduating class."

They climbed what felt like half a deck, approximately what Shepard expected had been left of the elevator shaft. With any luck, the maintenance duct would connect to a dark corner of the bridge, or even to an isolated room on the same deck. Her aunt and uncle had believed in karma; she never had, but she still found herself weighing everything she'd done against everything she could have done differently, and the scale wobbled back and forth endlessly, unable to settle.

Unlike Garrus, she'd always been steeped in gray, because every stark line in her world eventually blurred into it. Funny how she still struggled so much to make sense of it. Sometimes she envied the hell out of Samara.

She must have stopped climbing, as Garrus asked, "Where's your head?" 

"Here," she replied firmly, and shook her thoughts clear. Squeezing the rails of the ladder helped her focus.

The ladder terminated at the mouth of another duct, a little narrower than the one they'd left. Without discussion, they both slowed. No telling now how close they were, or how likely they were to alert the hijackers to their presence.

"How's the kid?" Shepard whispered.

Garrus dipped his head briefly. "Sound asleep. If we're lucky, he'll stay down for a while."

"If anyone can sleep through a firefight, it's a krogan."

"Speaking of which..." Garrus slowed to a halt. "My visor's picking up heat signatures. We're getting close."

Fewer things were noisier than a turian attempting to creep through a maintenance vent, so Shepard slipped around him with a whisper of, "I'll scout ahead."

The tunnel led straight ahead for about twenty meters before the light from her omni-tool bounced off a sharp turn. She followed it, ears straining, more shuffling than crawling. Thirty meters away, lighter filtered down from above on the rungs of another ladder. 

Drawing as close as she dared without the possibility of discovery, Shepard could just make out the strains of an argument. Two batarian voices, at least one asari, and a salarian occasionally interjecting. The few words she caught suggested an argument over whose fault it was the plan had gone unsalvageably awry, woven through with specific recriminations regarding the ship's drop from FTL and the death of the person with the clearest plan for the hijacking. Shepard's name came up, repeatedly.

She allowed herself a tight smile. Taking out the asari in the promenade had done more good than putting down an immediate threat; without her, the hijackers acted out of desperation rather than according to any strategy. There was no threat now of a coordinated ambush, only the danger of desperate people with nothing left to lose but the chance to take her down with them.

Angry orphans looking for answers where none existed—there were monsters in the dark, incomprehensible and relentless, and the those left in their wake all had to make their own sense out of the wreckage. The best any of them could hope for was to find others willing to fumble along with them, and problems they might be able to solve.

Some people made sense of the galaxy by trying to destroy it, and others by trying to save it, and even when she sank deep into a vast gray sea, Shepard could always pick out that line, as stark as ink and bone. Her head was here and now and sore.

She pulled herself forward a little farther on her elbows, silently, but couldn't risk an angle that gave her much useful information about the room above. The ceiling appeared to meet a wall. They might at least have the advantage of not coming out flanked.

Turning would have been too noisy, especially if the Graal scraped against the duct, so Shepard crawled backward until her feet registered the bend. When she reached Garrus, she said, "It's about fifty meters from here. We should come out near a wall. At least four hostiles, and they're arguing over who's in charge now."

"I doubt we're going to get a better chance to surprise them," he replied. "Ready?"

It was almost impossible for Garrus to move in silence through a metal duct, but he could scrape along slowly enough that the argument above would almost certainly drown him out. Shepard crept ahead to the base of the ladder, gathering herself for a biotic charge. Behind her, Garrus readied his Viper.

The krogan woke with a howl.

"Shit," Shepard muttered. Her charge didn't go off as precisely as she'd wanted—her foot caught painfully on the lip of the shaft—but she gritted her teeth and landed upright on one leg, within punching distance of a batarian. She registered the locations of two other batarians, two asari, and the salarian in the instant before detonating her barrier.

Everyone but the salarian and one of the asari flew backward against the walls of the small room. The two who had been just out of range recovered from their shock and opened fire.

She rolled, relieved that her legs cooperated, and felt a round graze her right forearm as she returned a volley from her SMG. The salarian screamed and grabbed his leg. When Shepard pulled herself up to charge again, she found herself seized by the asari's biotics and hurled back toward the shaft.

Garrus's shot flew beneath her into the asari's chest, shattering her broken armor into shards. Free of the biotic field, Shepard kicked off into a clumsy charge from the wall to avoid crashing into his head. 

Another round hit the asari's head. "Nice acrobatics, Shepard!"

His tone straddled the line between sincerity and friendly sarcasm. She landed on a struggling batarian in what she could almost pretend had been a kick, and two charged punches put him down.

A blow flicker alerted her just in time to duck out of the way of the other asari's biotic attack. From across the room, she heard the death-gurgle of a batarian. Shepard charged the Graal as she turned and fired a flechette into the asari's midsection. It bored through her into the arm of the third batarian, who had been lining up a shot behind her. Shepard finished him off with another, uncharged flechette.

She remembered that the salarian was only wounded just in time to flare a barrier around herself and halt a spray of fire. The shot she expected to hear from Garrus didn't come; fighting panic, she charged at the salarian where he lay shooting wildly on the floor. Low on flechettes, she turned the SMG on him.

When she turned, she found Garrus halfway out of the shaft, struggling to dislodge the krogan from his left mandible. She let out a loud breath.

"Little help?" he said.

"Hang on." They hadn't emerged into the bridge proper, but the door across the room surely led there, and anyone holed up on the bridge couldn't have missed the ruckus of the fight. Her omni-tool applied a basic layer of security to the door. Nothing as fancy as what Garrus could do, but enough to slow down any attackers.

She returned to the shaft and carefully pried the krogan's stubby fingers from his mandible. As she pulled the krogan away, she caught sight of a blue trickle running down his left arm to drip from the point of his elbow. "Shit, why didn't you tell me you got shot?"

"It went through clean," he replied. "Didn't hit anything important. It's not even bleeding much."

"You got _shot_ , Garrus."

"So did you, Shepard."

She glanced up from the medi-gel she was preparing to apply and noticed that blood had soaked through the ripped fabric over her forearm. "Grazed," she replied. "That's not the same thing." 

The krogan made a grab for the medi-gel, so she set it down on the floor, gave it a firm push away from the supplies, and sealed the hole in Garrus's arm. At least the entry and exit wounds were both small; he'd caught a round from an SMG, not a slug from a heavy pistol. He made a show of putting his arm through a full range of motion once the gel had set.

"Your turn," he said, rolling the tattered sleeve up her arm. The round had grazed a longer path that she'd realized and must have come within a millimeter of passing through her skin. Garrus tsked as he applied medi-gel along the wound.

Shepard used her left hand to shoo the krogan away from the pillow case. "I don't think the kid's learning."

"Please don't headbutt it again," Garrus said. "I'm starting to worry about your brain." He paused. "Well, starting to worry more."

She snorted. "Let's just see if we can find somewhere safe in here to keep it while we find out what's waiting patiently for us for the bridge. The anticipation is killing me." 

"Not literally, let's hope."

The room the duct led to might have served as a conference area or a break room on a traditional ship. As part of a ship that had been retrofitted for complete VI efficiency, it had been stripped of furniture; bolts and hooks still protruded from the floors and walls. The room's sole function now appeared to be providing access to the maintenance duct.

"The efficient ship of the new era looks so much like the ships of the old era without any of those pesky creature comforts," Garrus said.

"Save it for our trip review." Shepard eyed the hooks thoughtfully, then turned to find the krogan splashing merrily in a puddle of mingled salarian and asari blood. She scooped it up and held it at arm's length as Garrus wiped if clean and wrapped it firmly back into the sling, which she hung from a hook at the level of her waist. 

The krogan kicked the wall and gave her a look of bemused betrayal. "Stay put," she told it. As a peace offering, she gave it a packet of energy gel, which it slurped up with gusto. "Get back to that nap, okay, kiddo?"

It burbled noncommittally.

Garrus patted it on the head as she moved to the door. Even pressing her ear to the seam, she couldn't hear anything from the bridge. "Either we're very lucky and have run out of hijackers," she said, "or these are finally the smart ones."

"I think we've pushed our luck about as far as it can go."

Nodding, she helped herself to the last packet of energy gel. The last thing she needed was a poorly timed bonk. "Right," she said after wiping her mouth. "Let's end this."

They broke to opposite sites of the door. Garrus tapped at his omni-tool to remove Shepard's lock, then said, "They sealed it from the other side. Not very well, mind you, but this is an ambush."

Shepard charged the Graal. "Do it."

The door slid open, and a grenade flew in.

So clever, in such stupid ways. Shepard scooped it up with her biotics and flung it back into the bridge. A scream suggested success.

She charged into the room and was flung backward with vision-searing pain by the detonation of a shockwave. Her impact against the wall knocked the breath out of her lungs and the Graal out of her hand. Another flash of blue knocked it across the bridge. Garrus fired. Heavy footsteps charged.

In the time it took her to hit the floor and dive for cover behind the raised table of the galaxy map, Shepard noted that the grenade had done no visible damage and must have been contained by a barrier. Clever, she realized, in less stupid ways. The asari sizing her up from across the galaxy map wore battered but recognizable Eclipse armor.

At the edge of her vision, Garrus was locked in hand-to-hand combat with a krogan, his Viper kicked beneath the galaxy map. The asari raised what looked like a heavily modified Talon.

The bridge was as bare bones as Shepard had expected—the captain's chair was the only furniture—but the hooks and bolts of the ship's previous life remained. Her SMG had escaped her waistband. 

Shepard ducked and dived for the Viper. A heavy blast from the Talon rang in her ears.

Her back thumped against the bottom of the table as a biotic singularity inverted the local gravity. The galaxy map groaned against its bolts. When she found herself sucked toward the end of the table, she hooked her foot around one of the bolted supports. Trying to claw her way deeper into cover was as efficient as swimming through tar.

The asari's feet hit the ground in front of her, behind the glow of a barrier. When the asari bent to aim the Talon under the table, Shepard jabbed the Viper into her face and fired.

Shepard hit the floor belly-first as the singularity collapsed. Wincing, she dragged herself out from under the table, past the gory corpse of the asari. She took the Talon for herself.

Garrus and the krogan hijacker had also hit the floor, still locked in a wrestling match that was rapidly turning out in the krogan's favor. Shepard took a deep breath and charged into the krogan's exposed flank. The impact drew his attention; the heavy blast to his throat drew his blood.

She caught Garrus's eye, and he leapt out of the way before she detonated her barrier. The krogan hit the low ceiling before crashing to the floor, supine. With a grunt, she focused her biotics into slamming him into one of the long hooks jutting from the wall. She watched, warily, as he twitched into stillness, and used up the rest of the Talon's thermal clip to be certain.

"Lucky us," Garrus said, clapping her on the back, "they only brought along one full-grown krogan. Are you all right?"

After checking herself for red blood, she nodded. "Had a few close calls, but I gave better than I got. You?"

The plates around his eyes shifted toward one another as he stretched. "Picked up a few new bruises. Too bad I can't thank that asari for the singularity, since it kept me from needing another synthetic knee."

"I'm sure she would've been delighted to hear it." Shepard nodded toward the asari's corpse and added, "So there's our answer to how they managed to get hired as security. Think she's a former member?"

"Could be. I've never met one that lived to tell the tale of breaking ranks, but there's a first time for everything."

Garrus sounded too pensive. From what little he'd shared about his old squad, before his reminiscing inevitably ended with his throat tightening in time with the plates around his eyes, a few of the members had been motivated primarily by bloodlust and revenge, and justice was as good an excuse as any for them. Ripper and Mierin would have joined the Scavengers as readily as they'd joined him.

It was no good, Shepard told herself, trying to pretend you could save everyone. She leaned against him and felt his breathing slow. "This is the first time I've taken down a gang of terrorists in my civvies," she said, which got a small laugh out of him. "They're down, right? No clever bastards hiding in the walls?"

In the moment of quiet that followed, she heard the soft whirring of the tiny processor in the visor. Garrus scanned the room before nodding. "Everything's over now except the shouting. And the getting the VI systems back online." He flexed his fingers. "Since the console isn't a smoking wreck, I should be able to take care of that in no time at all. Then comes the shouting."

Shepard stepped back with a grimace. "I wouldn't mind putting off the shouting for a while. I'll check on the kid." As Garrus settled in at the console, she peeked into the room that led to the duct and smiled when she saw the krogan baby twitching in its sleep. She wondered whether the fight had worked as a lullaby, or if the kid had immediately lost interest in the waking world when the violence stopped.

"Out like a light," she reported, returning to the console. "How's the system look?"

"I won't tell you how close they were to disabling the life support," he replied, "because I'd like to save that for a fun guessing game the next time a peaceful afternoon seems boring." He paused to tap furiously. "Security's coming back online now. We should be able to see... Huh."

"Huh what?"

"Did you know there were escape pods on the holobeach deck?"

"'Were'?"

"Technically a few are still there. The rest were launched shortly after the jump to FTL."

Shepard sighed. "I don't know why I'm surprised. How many passengers are left?"

Garrus's forehead plates drew together as he flicked between screens. "No life signs on the deck. Either they all snapped and murdered each other, or once they found the pods, no one wanted to be left out of the mad rush to freedom."

"And they all launched during FTL travel?"

"Every last one. Must have been when the panic started." He scrolled with his finger. "Of course, they didn't stay at FTL for long, but they're going to be a pain in the ass to collect. I'm sure they're spread out over most of the system." A few more taps, and the galaxy map helpfully zoomed in on the Perseus Veil and populated itself with scattered yellow dots. "Oh, yeah, that's a treasure hunt."

And someone else's problem, Shepard reminded herself. "Are the comms working? We should let the galaxy know this hijacking didn't end as advertised."

"I can get us transmitting. If you'll do the broadcast honors, I'll scan the rest of the ship for life signs."

She nodded and moved in front of the vidcomm screen. Out of habit she smoothed her hair, then broke into laughter when her thumb brushed against a line of dried blood, her own or someone else's, along her hairline. Despite the best efforts of the Alliance and the Council to clean her up for public appearances, most of the galaxy knew her as a tenacious thing always on the edge of a Pyrrhic victory, perpetually having just clawed her way out of the rubble to rally life against the dark.

Which didn't feel any truer, but it was getting easier to wake up in the morning without a flicker of disappointment. 

She must have tensed her shoulders, because one of Garrus's hands curled over hers. She exhaled slowly.

"We've got the place all to ourselves," he said. "Ready to break the good news?"

"Hey, I can pull two things out of my ass anytime: victories and speeches." With a glance at the screen, she added, "We're not transmitting yet, are we?"

"No, I've learned that lesson more than once." He tapped a button. "Live in three... two... one..."

At his nod, she leaned closer to the screen and said, "This is Commander Shepard aboard the _Spirit of Talis Fia_. The hijackers are dead and the passengers are safe. Sorry to say that the crew aren't accounted for." And likely wouldn't ever be, unless they'd been fortunate enough not to make it aboard in the first place. She gave them a moment's silence. "I'll be activating the distress signal to find us a ride home. So if you've been watching, don't worry; it's over. All we have to do is collect the escape pods." She smiled reassuringly. "Shepard out."

Garrus ended the recording and set the transmission to loop, and Shepard breathed.

Problem, solution: terrorists hijack ship, heroes kill terrorists and protect civilians. And it wasn't that simple, because nothing ever was; underneath lay all the twisted roots, poverty and desperation and cycling revenge, and these problems were all the galaxy's, not hers alone. The ripples of her actions, good and bad, overlapped billions upon billions of others, canceling out some and redoubling others, refracting and reflecting. Here was the living galaxy, chaotic and broken and wild and gray, and it would never fit on her scarred back.

She took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders.

"I suppose 'They're your problem again' would have been a little strong." Garrus's hand slipped into hers. "But that's that. Where's your head, Shepard?"

She faced him and was almost surprised at how easily her smile came. "Glad it's here, even when it goes dark." Her hip twinged; she shifted some of her weight onto him before adding, "Thanks for sticking around for it."

"I wouldn't miss it for anything. Are we still talking about your head?"

His seductive tone sounded almost exactly like his supportive boyfriend tone, which was how his first effort to cheer her up with greasy takeout, drinks, and rooftop target practice after a bad physical therapy session had led to the invention of strip bottle-shooting. There was some difference in the flanging, probably, but she couldn't hear it any more than she could distinguish between what he insisted were obviously non-identical shades of purple.

Not that he was often subtle enough to be ambiguous, and in any case she knew which side she wanted to err on.

She pressed closer, running her hand down the line of his keel. "Say, didn't I invite you to something?"

His mandibles flicked wide enough to show all his teeth, then fluttered as she brushed her fingertips along his waist. Her tongue traced over his scars before dipping into the heat of his mouth. He grabbed her hips and lifted her, laughing, into the captain's chair.

"Start keeping that count," he said, as she unfastened his shirt, "so I can make you lose it."

* * *

Tali holds up her hands. "Let's skip ahead, please?"

"You sure?" Garrus drawls. "I hear your Nerve-Stim experience is only as good as your fantasy fodder."

"Bosh'tet."

* * *

They ended up on top of the table where the galaxy map could no longer quite project itself, amid the flickering ghosts of holographic stars. Her sweat streaked the smooth surface and puddled between the joints of his plates. Sweat was still a little weird to him, even if the slipperiness was usually fun. Her upper body draped across his chest, too bonelessly to qualify as an embrace.

Her mouth vibrated against his neck as she mumbled something his translator didn't even attempt to decode. "Didn't catch that," he said.

"Mmph." As Shepard shifted herself to be more beside than on top of him, he glimpsed faint impressions of his plates on her skin. She objected to "squishy," usually by flexing her biceps at him, but the fact remained that her body accommodated pressure in fascinating ways. 

Once she was settled again, arm curved along his cowl, she said, "Thirty-six."

"Well, I did make an effort."

She snorted. "That was my _kill_ count."

"Ah." This did seem more in line with what he'd learned about human biology. "You know that Atlas pilot was mine, right?"

"Fine. Thirty-five. You?"

"Thirty-three. You're counting the thruster as ten, aren't you?"

"And you missed the window to challenge it." She wiggled through the galaxy's laziest horizontal victory dance before stilling, sighing, and adding, "Is it fucked up if I say this was a pretty good day?"

He considered. "Probably, yeah. But fucked up isn't the worst thing you can be. A good turian follows bad orders. And I've never been able to figure out what it is a good human does, but..." Her gaze was uncomfortably intense, so he snipped that fraying line of thought and tried again: "What I'm trying to say is, I had a pretty good day, too. I liked the part where I got to drive the Atlas. And the part where we shorted out the galaxy map."

Her laugh rippled against him. "I don't think that chair is adjustable anymore, either."

They fist-bumped.

"Seriously, though," she said. "We just saved a bunch of rich assholes from a bunch of terrorists. Lower stakes, right? And we didn't fix anything wrong with the galaxy, and maybe someone else could have negotiated a different solution, but we did what we do, and it worked. Today could have been a hell of a lot worse without us." She tilted her face toward him, smiling crookedly. "I think I needed this."

Her eyes were the least haunted Garrus had seen them since before Bahak. He brushed a sweat-slicked lock of hair away from them before replying, "You saw me out of my darkness. I'll be here to see you out of yours."

She was a quiet for a moment. "I'm still not sure what kind of done I am. Can't promise I'll be up for retiring to the tropics just yet."

"Well, the tropics aren't going anywhere." He rested his hand on her collarbone and stroked his thumb along its hollow. "My life's a lot better when you're in it. I'll follow you anywhere."

Her fingers curled between his. "Good. I don't know where I'd go without you."

"No Shepard without Vakarian, was it?"

"And vice-versa." 

For a moment they were silent, listening to each other breathe, until he asked, "Did you ever activate that distress signal?"

"Riiight, the distress signal." After a languid stretch, she thumped her free hand against the console until it blinked to life. "There."

Her hand returned to stroke Garrus's nape, just along the edges of the plates. He hummed contentedly and said, "Keep that up and you'll put me to sleep."

"Sounds good to me." She tucked her head against his shoulder. "Kid's still quiet. This vacation's getting better."

He curved his neck into a very nice touch, then stiffened as the system chirped, "Incoming video transmission."

Shepard jolted upright. "Shit, that was fast."

"Well, we're not far now from Rannoch." Garrus reached over and had nearly tapped the button to answer when Shepard swatted his hand away.

Gesturing from her naked body to his, she said, "You really want to show up on the vid chat like this?"

"Ah, right." After rolling off the table, he groped around the floor for the nearest large article of clothing, tossed it to her, and said, "Put this on. I'll patch the call through to your omni-tool, and then we'll just be careful with the angle."

She shook out the fabric. "This is your shirt."

"I don't see yours anywhere."

Grumbling, she tugged it over her head, then turned it backward to make the neckline less indecent. "I found my pants," she announced a moment later. "I found _half_ my pants. What the hell, Garrus?"

"They got stuck, remember? You never liked them anyway." He clapped her omni-tool to her wrist, cutting off a protest. "Tilt it up and smile, Shepard. You're on."

He tapped the command to initiate and dodged the half-pants she threw at his head.

* * *

"That explains the view I got of Shepard," Tali says dryly.

Garrus perks up like an excited pyjack. "Wait, what did I miss?"

"Nothing you haven't seen a lot of, and recently," Shepard replies. "Anyway, that's that. The kid's sleeping, the passengers are in escape pods scattered over who knows how much of the system, and Garrus and I are a little banged up but alive. What's the ETA on your ship?"

A long, sly smile shifts the layers of Tali's face. "Why would you be in any sort of hurry?"

This is going nowhere good. "Tali," Shepard begins, but she's cut off by a long hum.

"Let me get this straight: you're on a resort ship with plenty of dextro and levo foods, functional life support, and unattended shops—"

"Sure, but—"

"And neither of you needs immediate medical treatment?" Tali's smile widens. "Hmm, the response team really ought to collect those scattered escape pods and tow them back to Rannoch as quickly as possible. After all, your favorite actor on the Citadel is out there. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait."

Shepard jerks her thumb toward the makeshift nursery room. "What about the kid?"

"I've been exchanging messages with Wrex. I'll forward them to you, but the gist is to feed it soft levo food, give it a few sips of ryncol if it won't sleep, and not worry too much. And if you really want to know its sex, you can either, I quote, 'stick your finger in there' or wait a few weeks."

Garrus coughs. "I'm suddenly feeling very patient."

"That's a first," says Shepard. "Tali, you realize this ship is full of dead hijackers, right?"

"And you just had sex in a room with two of them in it. Stop making excuses." Tali waves the hand that isn't dancing over her console. "I'll let Liara know that she needs new agents on Omega and Tuchanka. I'll forward the files from that datapad to Wrex. And I'll arrange transport home for the baby. Later. Once you've _relaxed_."

Shepard tries once more, with flagging conviction: "Tali—"

"Enjoy your vacation." Tali's hologram wobbles and winks out. 

In the sudden quiet, Shepard hears her own frustrated noises echo. _Just you wait,_ she types to Tali, _until I decide that you need to unwind._

Tali's response is almost immediate: _Tea and feelings,_ followed by what Shepard assumes is a quarian emoticon.

Scowling, Shepard closed the connection on her omni-tool. "She's surprisingly evil."

"I've been trying to tell you that for years, Shepard." Garrus lets out an exaggerated sigh. "Well, if I'm going to be doomed to finish this vacation, at least I know I'll enjoy the company."

He presses his forehead against hers, and she can't quite stop herself from wincing.

There's little point in denying it: "Headbutting's catching up with me." 

A laugh rumbles low in his chest, and he murmurs an "I told you so" before dipping to nuzzle her cheek. She can imagine how many colors and textures her face is by now, and it isn't pretty; it's a good thing their relationship has never been about prettiness. When he straightens, he strokes his thumb along her jaw.

She smiles and reaches up to touch his scars. "Do you still want kids?"

He looks like she's just walked in and caught him fucking the Thanix cannon. "I. Uh. When did I say that?"

"You joke about it too much not to be serious about it."

He sucks in his mandibles for a moment before letting them relax with a huff. "No pressure. Obviously. But... yeah. I think we'd do all right as parents. We haven't had to replace the fish lately."

The eel is nearly old enough for an anniversary, albeit only because it got through the lean times by consuming the other residents of the aquarium. Probably better not to mention that. "Maybe this is the near-concussion talking," Shepard says, tipping her head casually toward the makeshift nursery, "but we could ask Wrex—"

Something complicated but mostly panicked animates the plates around Garrus's eyes. "Uh—"

"—if we can take Urz home with us," she finishes lightly. "For practice."

He gives her a look she hasn't seen since he last tried to have a conversation with Javik. "You know what my favorite thing about our apartment is? It doesn't smell like varren shit."

"Been on your side of the kitchen lately?"

His mandibles twitch as his hand drifts down her arm. "Speaking of which, wanna find some new clothes and dig through the wreckage for dinner?"

"Sounds like a plan. After dinner, wanna use some fancy hats for target practice?"

"You read my mind, Shepard."

She pairs her fingers together to lace with his, and they make it four steps before the krogan starts howling.

* * *

Salarian hats quickly establish themselves as Shepard's favorite. They're always tall and often bifurcated, usually velvety soft, and sometimes laden with colorful baubles.

What makes them even better is that in all her galactic travels, she has never seen a salarian wear any head covering but a hood. These are useless products, elaborately designed for a market uninterested in them. If the haberdashery has sold any at all, it has been to asari attempting to impose aesthetics upon their bondmates.

She rolls her wrist back and forth, warming up as she grips a felt, bifurcated pink hat by its bill. When she flings it from the balcony, Garrus tracks its arc across the promenade for half a second before firing. Pink felt scatters over the ruins of the Atlas.

Garrus takes a moment for a satisfied nod before reaching into the bin of hats they've dragged down to the center of the promenade. "Ooh, this one has bells," he says, producing an elaborate green monstrosity with a jingling flourish. 

With a grin, Shepard types the absurd price into a datapad, into their growing spreadsheet of expenses. Liara offered, after all.

She accepts the Viper and settles it in place, aligning her eye with the scope. "Pull."

The hat flies in a whirlwind of bells, which scatter satisfyingly when Shepard's shot rips through the horns. Behind her, safely inside a shop, the krogan squeals its approval. She can hear its little feet slapping against the floor as it bounces in the jumper they commandeered for it. From the sound of things, this time they've done a good enough job of reinforcing the seat to keep it from escaping.

As she lowers the Viper, Garrus leans over the edge of the balcony and clucks his tongue. "Most of the hat landed on the Atlas, but the bells all went wide. I'm afraid we can't count that as a bullseye."

"You're so full of shit, Vakarian." She joins him at the rail. "One of those bells is almost inside the pharmacy. If anything, that's worth an extra five points."

"That's not anywhere in the rules."

"We came up with those rules when we were drunk."

"Your point being?"

The original point, she recalled hazily, had been to encourage losing as quickly as possible. So with a look of exaggerated irritation, she peels off her shirt.

Garrus makes an appreciative flanging noise. "Now we're getting somewhere."

"Your pants are next." Shepard passes him the Viper, then digs through the bin of hats until she finds a tasseled abomination designed either for a salarian who had abnormally long horns, or one who wished he did. She tosses it up and down in her hand to test its weight.

As Garrus records the price, which he points out is more than he made in a month when he started with C-Sec, Shepard's omni-tool flashes an alert. It's a message from Tali: _Just checking in. We've retrieved 70% of the escape pods. Everything still okay?_

They're still sore in multiple places, but the only fresh injuries are the result of headbutting mishaps. They've dragged most of the bodies to the airlocks, at least in the areas they frequent. They've destroyed a small fortune's worth of inexcusable hats.

They're broken in ways that can't be fixed, no more than they can fix the rest of the galaxy, and sometimes, she thinks, it's still okay.

As she sends her reply, Garrus asks, "Do you smell that?"

Shepard sniffs and grimaces. Behind her, the krogan giggles. "I do now. It's your turn to change it."

"How about whoever lost the last round does it?"

"That's not anywhere in the rules."

"I suppose I walked into that." With a sigh, Garrus sets down his rifle. 

"Look on the bright side," says Shepard. "Its not varren shit."


End file.
